


Egyptology Meets Yu-Gi-Oh

by Nedjemet



Series: Egyptology Exercises [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Egyptology, Notes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 20,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26605600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nedjemet/pseuds/Nedjemet
Summary: This is a COMPLETELY optional sister “fic” to "All This We Do in the Name of Ma'at". It’s not a story. It’s my Yu-Gi-Oh themed Egyptology notes. You don’t have to read them. In fact, I don't expect you to. I’ve spent a lot of time researching this thing, though, so I figured I may as well post them.Just make sure you've read up to the most recent chapter of "All This We Do in the Name of Ma'at" before reading this unless you don't mind spoilers.Also, since this has come up, feel free to use anything in here for your own fics if you'd like. I would be nothing less than honored to see my work used elsewhere. (Aka, please justify my hours of research :P )
Series: Egyptology Exercises [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1935481
Comments: 116
Kudos: 62





	1. Magic in Ancient Egypt

There were three basic elements required to perform magic in ancient egypt:

The spell - words held immense power in the days of the pharaohs. If you said something under the right conditions, it may come to pass. There wasn’t a special ‘language’ of magic, though. While modern wizarding lore has people spouting off bastardized latin, the Egyptians believed they could use their own language and the magic would flow because of what was done as they spoke the words.

The ritual - this is magic’s performative element. You couldn't just say some words, you had to do something, too. A lot of the time this meant drawing a circle because encircling was very important. For example, there was a spell to protect one being stung by scorpions as they slept. To make that spell work, it had to be said while you drew a circle around the person’s bed. Spellcraft could also involve items depending on what you were trying to do.

The magician - of course, not everyone could use magic. You had to be a special person to have power. For the most part, this meant being a priest (the coptic word for ‘magician’ even translates to ‘scribe of the house of life’), but there were exceptions to this rule.

So, to do magic, we need words, an act, and a person with magic. This is why the prologue has Atemu (the magician) draw two cartouches in a circle and place his puzzle between them (the ritual) as he says what he wants done (the spell).

Speaking of those cartouches, it’s worth mentioning that names were a big deal in Egypt. If you knew a person’s name, you could work magic on them. No name, no magic, and it couldn’t just be whatever the person went by. It had to be the name given to the person at birth, which was often kept secret. Because of this, many Egyptians had a common name and a secret name.

This is why the spell involved two cartouches. The first housed the name of the guardian (Atemu). The second housed the name of the enemy (Zorc) who would be sealed away with the guardian. Put it all together and you have our opening scene! There’s also context for the words Atemu speaks and there’s a reason I didn’t use a best-guess translation, but we’ll get to that later.

I suppose I should mention that the Egyptians used magic wands in their spellwork, but in my fic, those are replaced by the millennium items.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Source: the lecture “Ancient Egyptian Magic” from the “The Great Courses” course “The History of Ancient Egypt” by Bob Brier. Also referenced was the lecture “Ancient Egyptian Thought” from the same series.
> 
> If you have a subscription to “The Great Courses” or if your library gives you access to the documentary service “Kanopy”, I highly recommend checking out this lecture series by Bob Brier. It’s truly excellent.


	2. When Did Atemu Rule

You’ll often hear people refer to an ancient culture as having a certain set of beliefs, lore, and customs as if these things were consistent from start to finish. This is rather silly, especially when it comes to a culture that spanned thousands of years. As time goes by, beliefs change, lore evolves, and customs develop. What was true in the Egyptian Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BCE) may not be true in the New Kingdom (1550-1069 BCE).

To try and be somewhat accurate, we do need to at least assign Atemu to one of the set historical periods in Ancient Egypt.

Luckily, I don’t have to do too much guesswork here because there’s technically two canonical dates to choose from. The original Japanese version has Atemu born around 1000 BCE. The 4Kids dub places his birth around 3000 BCE. Why they did this, who knows (I guess 5000 years sounds better than 3000?), but we can actually tell which is the better choice because of two key elements: the valley of the kings and the fact that they ride horses.

The pharaohs of the Old Kingdom were the one who built the pyramids and used them as their tombs. By the time we got to the New Kingdom, the Egyptians had realized this was as good as painting a giant sign that said “treasure can be found here, please come rob me”. So, instead of crafting obvious burial sites, they constructed hidden tombs. These tombs are all found in a place known as the valley of the kings. This is where Atemu’s tomb laid, so he’s either a major trend-setter or a New Kingdom Pharaoh. I went with the latter.

This is arguably enough evidence to make our guess, but I find the horse thing funny, so we’ll talk about that, too.

There’s not an exact date for when horses showed up in Ancient Egypt, but we do know that it happened somewhere around the time of the Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550 BCE). By the time the New Kingdom came around, horses were common enough, but only among the Egyptian elite. They were not used by the common man as beasts of burden.

Interestingly enough, evidence suggests that riding a horse wasn’t really a thing at this time. Instead, they were used to pull chariots, possibly because the saddle had yet to be invented and there was a high risk of falling off. There was also the fact that horses were used in battle and riding bareback while firing a bow-and-arrow seems tricky at best.

Still, it wasn’t unheard of to go for a ride, so Atemu charging off into the night bareback isn’t an insane scene.

Given these historical landmarks, we’re going with 1000 BCE as the approximate year of birth for our spiky-haired king. This sets him on the throne a few decades into the Third Intermediate Period (1069-664 BCE), but I’m just going to stick to New Kingdom beliefs to keep things simple. Suck it, 4Kids.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Source: these notes mostly touch on what I consider common knowledge elements of Egypt. I didn’t have to look them up. I knew them because they show up everywhere. However, if you want a brief overview of Egyptian chronology, [this short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lzZlNsybAc&ab_channel=VoicesofAncientEgypt) is a great general introduction to what terms like "New Kingdom" and "Intermediate Period" actually mean.


	3. Atemu’s Shadow, Yuugi’s Protector (The Shuyet)

For all that the Egyptians venerated writing, they sure had a weird idea of what should be written down. We know Ramese II’s usual breakfast, yet no one has ever found a guide on how to build a pyramid. Now, it could be that records _were_ created and they’ve either not been found yet or are gone forever, but most Egyptologist seem to think that they just don’t exist.

Whatever the case may be, the lack of clear texts on certain topics makes things.... fun. Especially when the topic in question touches on the metaphysical. We can figure out a lot of stuff about a physical creation like a pyramid, but we can’t just magic up an understanding of how Egyptians viewed their souls.

We do know some things for certain, though. We know that the Egyptians believed that the soul had many parts. We also know that one of those parts was the shadow, which was called the “Shut” or “Shuyet” (same concept, different spellings. I’ll be using the one that doesn’t double as a word in English to avoid confusion.)

While we don’t have a full understanding of the shuyet’s powers, we do know it had them. We know that it contained some part of the person's essence and served as a guide or protector. It may have also had something to do with comfort, which fits the whole protector motif. The shuyet became a separate entity of sorts and was depicted as a completely black replica of the owner's form. It’s survival was important, but not guaranteed. A spell from the book of the dead specifically calls out for the shuyet to “not be defeated”.

Because of how little we know, I’m taking some liberties here and having fun with the idea of Atemu having a sort of Peter Pan situation with his shadow. It’s part of him, but also not fully under his control. Thus its ability to manifest when Atemu still hasn’t quite figured out how to do that. 

When Yuugi first solved the puzzle, the shuyet’s protection instinct went crazy. Poor thing’s crying and the shuyet is like, _I must fulfill my duty and comfort this innocent ball of fluff. Then I’m going to go_ **murder** _whoever made him cry._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> Like I said, we don’t have a great understanding of what exactly the shuyet could do. I’ve read through a dozen articles and books on the soul to try and get a clearer picture to make sure I don’t butcher the concept. None of them gave me more than a vague paragraph or two, though. I’ll just give you my two favorite websites:
> 
> [Ancient History Encyclopedia: The Soul in Ancient Egypt](https://www.ancient.eu/article/1023/the-soul-in-ancient-egypt/) (Warning, this one does not like add blocking!)
> 
> [Ancient Egypt Online: The Ancient Egyptian Soul](https://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/soul/)
> 
> Also referenced was "Ramses II" by Mark A. Simpkins and Susan Taylor (a short book on the life of this Pharaoh and the source of my knowledge on Pharaonic breakfasts. Apparently, the king usually ate this meal alone. The standard offering was ‘bread, meat, cake, and beer’. Fascinating, right?)


	4. Duel Monsters & Shabti

As you’ve already seen, I changed duel monsters a bit. The cards now have a spell written onto their surface. As Professor Hawkin’s guessed, this is based on the egyptian shabti (also called ‘ushabti’, ‘shawabti’, and several other variants. I went with the one that was used for the spell in my book.)

To understand how these little guys worked, we have to briefly go over what the afterlife was to an Egyptian. It was called the Fields of Iaru (Fields of Reeds) and was basically just a better version of Egypt. If you were a farmer on earth, you’d be a farmer there, too. However, instead of having to do all of the work yourself, you could now use shabtis.

Shabti were statues that people had buried with them. When their master called them, they were supposed to rise up and work for their master so that their master didn’t have to do hard labor anymore. There were even different types of shabti. Some were field workers with little farming implements. Some were overseers meant to manage the worker shabti. The more money you had, the better your shabti. 

It seems like you wanted your shabti to have the relevant spell from the book of the dead carved on them. However, it may be that this spell could also just be said over the shabti to properly activate them for the deceased’s use because not all shabti have the spell. It was definitely important, though, because there are cases of the poor being buried with papyrus that just had the spell since they couldn’t afford statues.

That spell actually varied slightly, but was basically “ _Oh shabti, if [the deceased] is commanded to do any work in the realm of the dead: to prepare the fields, to irrigate the land, or to convey sand from east to west; “Here I am” you shall say._ ”

This is the first time Atemu’s year of rule really matters to the story. Shabti did not appear until the middle kingdom and, at that time, you were only buried with a small number of them. By the end of the New Kingdom, people were getting buried with hundreds of the things (365 seems to be standard). It got to the point that we have evidence of shabti ‘factories’ producing the things en masse because so many were needed.

All of this is the basis for my concept of duel monsters. You have a massed produced item (the card) imbued with a spell that makes it come to life when its owner calls it. It’s actually more complex than that, but we’ll get there soon enough. Oh, and the spell? It reads:

_Oh [monster name], if one who is worthy calls you to be held, you shall appear. If one who is worthy calls to you for aid, “Here I am” you shall say._

It’s the _“Here I am” you shall say_ bit that made our good professor think of shabti.

One final note. This is all about magic, NOT religion. While the magicians of Egypt were usually also priests, there was a difference between religious rights and magic. Magic is an act done by a human wielding their own powers or the powers of something not of the gods. Religious rights are things done by the gods at the requests of humans. Now, that magic power came from a god (Heca or Heka), but it wasn’t done by the god. Sort of like how there were gods of writing, but things were still written by humans. Just calling that out now because it does matter. No gods or goddesses have been involved so far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources: the lecture “Ancient Egyptian Magic” from the “The Great Courses” course “The History of Ancient Egypt” by Bob Brier. (I cannot stress how much I love this lecture.)
> 
> “Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt” by Salima Ikram (Good book. I also consulted it for the stuff about shuyets. It had a single paragraph. Shabti got three pages. Just wanted to emphasise how little we know about the shuyet.)


	5. The Millennium Items

Things that existed in Ancient Egypt: amulets, magic spells, magic wands.

Things that did not exist: anything remotely resembling the Millennium Items.

Like I said in the first chapter of these notes, magic wasn’t just mumbo-jumbo words. It was a performative ritual. The millennium items seemingly go against this practice and act more like the modern concept of magic. For example, Pegasus just grabs people’s souls without any form of spell. He doesn’t even appear to use their names! (A big requirement for performing magic against a person.)

Now, we could go the Full Metal Alchemist route and say the items removed the rules of magic based on how they were made, but I’m going to do something that I feel is more respectful to the Egyptian beliefs.

When an amulet was created in ancient Egypt, it was only good for one thing. A specific, magical task that it performed and that task was defined by its design (Ex: the scarab beetle represented continued existence.) I’m extending this concept to the millennium items. They each get one thing they can do on their own. This makes them powerful, but not all-powerful. 

Sorry Pegasus, no random ability to draw out people’s souls with the eye alone. What even was that? Why could he do that? No one _else_ could do it.

I touched on this a bit in the section on Atemu’s shadow, but the Egyptian concept of the soul was very different from our concept of the soul. Combine that with the whole name thing and, well, there’s a lot of reasons why what Pegasus did in the show makes no sense from an Egyptian perspective. 

The items can still do magic, though, because I’m having them double as a more stylish replacement for magic wands. Once again, those were a thing in Egypt. (Seriously, google them. They’re covered in carvings and look like boomerangs.) They were usually made of bone and were covered in meaningful, magical markings. Now, there is no evidence of a wand being an amulet and amulet magic was more passive than active, but give me a break guys. I’m doing the best I can here!

To sum up, the items each gets one, unique power and everything else they do requires the user to loosely follow the standards set by the Egyptians. What exactly the items’ powers are will be revealed as we go. We’ll also get into what exactly the items are.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Source: the lecture “Ancient Egyptian Magic” from the “The Great Courses” course “The History of Ancient Egypt” by Bob Brier


	6. Atem vs Atemu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting these notes now because I realized were going to get note crazy later on so I wanted to spread it out a bit more and this isn't a spoiler so, yeah. Enjoy!

Okay, let’s get this out of the way now: does Atem sound better? To my ears, yes. Is it the name that I’ve known him by most of my life? Also yes. Is it his name according to the show? No and I’m referring to both versions here.

See, here’s the thing about hieroglyphs. For all that they look like pictures, they’re really just a fancy way of writing letters (most of the time). Like an image of a foot is just a fancy way of writing the phonetic equivalent to “b”. So, if you put a bunch of hieroglyphs together, you’re giving someone a way to phonetically pronounce something. The name we get in the show and manga is this:

The vulture is the “a” sound.The loaf or bread is a “t” sound. The reed is an “i” or “y” sound called the semetic yodh. The owl is an “m” sound. The quail chick is a “w” or “u” sound.

Put that all together and you get Atimw or Atimu. You don’t get Atem (or Ah-tea-m) unless you cut off that last letter. So, yeah, I’m calling him Atemu because that is how you pronounce the name they show us in literally every version. 

Which is a little funny. Come on, 4Kids, you’re gonna spend the money to edit out guns, but you can take the time to make sure that the character’s name is spelled right? It also makes the scene where Atemu reads his name for the first time more than a little hilarious.

“My name is Atem!” 

No, no it’s really not honey. That’s not what that says. Your memory isn’t fully back yet, is it?

This is also why I used the Japanese names instead of the English ones since the Atemu spelling gets associated with the Japanese version even though, technically, it should be both.

Some other fun facts about hieroglyphs! 

I mentioned above that most of the time they were pictorial letters and NOT pictographs (images that represent exactly what they are). This actually wasn’t always true. There were times that hieroglyphs were used to represent exactly what they looked like. If you see what looks like a hieroglyph with a line under it, that means it's a picture of what it is, not a letter. You sometimes see this after the word is written out. For example, you might have the word “boat” and then a picture of a boat. This was probably done so that common people could get the general gist of what was written because literacy was not widespread in ancient Egypt.

You would also just see the underlined picture with no associated word. Probably for much the same reason, but also so that you could fit whatever you were trying to say in the allotted space. A lot of the fun with hieroglyphs was making whatever you were writing look nice, which is why it's like the only language that doesn’t have a set direction for reading. It can be read left to right in one situation, right to left in the next, and top to bottom in the third! Whatever looked best.

Another fun fact, hieroglyphs were the ancient equivalent to cursive. They’re what you used to write down things that would last (like stuff on temple walls) or stuff that was really important, but there was a “print” version of the language, too, that allowed for faster writing. You actually see both of these on the Rosetta stone along with Greek. Yeah, it looks like three languages, but it’s really only two. One just shows up in two forms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> “Hieroglyphs” by Penelope Wilson (I used this to translate Atemu’s name)  
> [This tumblr post](https://whats-wrong-with-ygo.tumblr.com/post/161987780742/please-read-here-first-im-sorry-if-i-was-wrong) is not mine, but it does the exact same thing I did here, just with more pictures!  
> The lecture “The Rosetta Stone, and Much More” from the “The Great Courses” course “The History of Ancient Egypt” by Bob Brier  
> [This YouTube video is a pretty good summary of how hieroglyphs were deciphered. I prefer the Bob Brier one since it's longer and has more detail, but that's behind a paywall, so have this one, too!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju2JBoe9C7A&ab_channel=VoicesofAncientEgypt)


	7. What’s in a Name (The Ren)

Time to revisit the Egyptian concept of the soul! As we discussed in our notes on the [shuyet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26605600/chapters/65076700), the Egyptians believed that the soul was not a singular entity. Instead, it was a collection of pieces that worked as a whole in life and then served different functions in death. One of those pieces was called the ren. Unlike the shuyet, we actually know quite a few things about the ren.

At a very basic level, “ren” translates to “name” because the concept of the ren was believed to be tied to your name. As long as your name endured, your ren survived. Because of this, it was considered a great crime to destroy a person’s name. Striking that out was as good as denying them the afterlife.

The only time it was okay to remove a name was if the person had done something heinous in life and needed punishment. This is why, in the scene with the tablet, I mention that Atemu’s cartouche is  _ blank _ , not chiseled out. No one destroyed his ren, it simply wasn’t recorded. That is  _ very  _ weird for an Egyptian and would likely imply that something odd is going on. I don’t think anything like it has ever been found in reality. Cartouches either have a name in them or they have clearly had the name removed. There’s no instance of a cartouche with nothing inside of it.

For more on the concept of damnatio memoriae (the systematic removal of name, image, and record to condemn an individual to obscurity) check out the podcast I list in the sources for this chapter. It goes in depth about this concept which, while fascinating, isn’t relevant to this story. Atemu did not go through damnatio memoriae, so I’m going to move on to talking about why I use the word “Ren” in the prologue instead of just saying “name”.

See, while your name represented your ren, the concept of the ren went far beyond the name.

According to my book (see sources) “a name provided one with an identity. Without a name one was rendered a non-person and would cease to exist, the worst possible fate imaginable.” Because of this, you’d find people’s names all over their tombs and the associated mortuary temples.

The tomb was the part that was sealed off from the world and held the body. The mortuary temples were the part that was open to the public and is where a lot of the pretty scenes come from. The reason these temples were so lovely was to encourage visitors and visitors were encouraged to speak the owner’s name aloud to help ensure that the owner was remembered, allowing them to flourish in the afterlife.

Yeah, the ren was tied to memory, too. Certain texts I’ve read indicate that it held your memories, meaning that, if your ren disappeared, your memories did, too. I’m using the  **_hell_ ** out of that idea for this fic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ The Egyptian History Podcast Episode 18: The Guards Themselves ](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-18-the-guards-themselves/) (This podcast can be a bit dry, but it’s excellent listening! Each episode falls between 30 minutes to an hour and the host tends to cover several topics. This means that, when I quote this show, it’s often not going to be the first thing you hear when you start listening.)  
> Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt by Salima Ikram


	8. How Long Was Atemu’s Rule

If you’re going by the show, somewhere between 3 and 8 months. If you’re going by the manga, then it’s still a 3 month minimum, but you could  **_maybe_ ** go as high as three years. I’m going with a few months for reasons we’re about to get into. Warning, this is a long one with a lot of ground to cover. 

Also, a good deal of my content for this one comes from the Egyptian History Podcast. To keep my ending source notes from being a mess, whenever I mention a specific pharaoh, I’m going to put the episode that deals with that pharaoh next to his name in case you want to have a listen. All other sources will be listed at the end along with any relevant commentary from me!

Okay, let’s get started. Time to talk about mummies!

There’s a lot of details we don’t know about mummification, but we do know how long it took to go from fresh corpse to finished mummy. The lecture I have in my sources says 70 days and my podcast says about three months, which is basically the same thing and is how we get our minimum for Atemu’s rule. 

For Akhenamkhanen (Atemu’s father) to have his mummy stolen from his tomb, it has to be  **_in_ ** the tomb. That could only happen after his mummy was completed, so at least three months have to have come and gone since he died.

Even though the mummification process took three months, Atemu would still have been Pharaoh pretty much as soon as his father died. It was traditional that, as long as a clear successor was available, a king would ascend to the throne no later than the morning after his predecessor’s death. This event even had a name, the “appearing in glory”.

So, there you have it, Atemu ruled for at least three months.

The maximum is a little more complicated. For that, we need to talk about child rulers, coronation ceremonies, and the ages of both Atemu and Ancient Egyptian Seto/Seti (I’m gonna go with Seti after this to avoid confusion).

[According to the shonen jump wiki](https://jump.fandom.com/wiki/Pharaoh_Atem), Atemu is 16 . This tracks with the evidence in the manga (which I read to prepare for this fic). According to it, the millennium items were forged 15 years before the scenes we see in the memory world. When the manga talks about this, we’re shown images of a young child that is probably supposed to be Atemu. 

It’s hard to be sure, though. 

In the scene in question, there’s a clearly noble woman holding a baby and standing next to Akhenamkhanen, but neither the woman or the baby have the standard spiky hair. I’m still gonna assume that’s Atemu and his mom, though, because who else would it be? That puts our favorite Pharaoh between 15 and 17 in the memory world. I’ll just stick with the wiki here and say he’s 16.

We’re also shown a young Seti who looks to be somewhere between 4 and 6. That puts him between 19 and 21 in the memory world. [According to the wiki](https://jump.fandom.com/wiki/Priest_Seto), he’s 20, so we’re gonna go with that. 

Both of these numbers are important.

There’s this idea that, in the ancient world, childhood ended when you were, like, seven or some other absurdly young number. This is largely wrong. Just because you had a shorter life doesn’t mean that you were magically able to mature faster. Kids were still kids. Similarly, teenagers are teenagers no matter how long ago you look. Those crazy hormones didn’t just randomly start popping up in the modern day.

Now, it’s entirely possible that peasant children were expected to start working at a young age by doing things like helping in the fields or running errands, but those aren’t tasks with a ton of responsibility behind them. They’re things that we might trust a modern 10-year old with. For tasks like ruling the country or being a high priest, though? Yeah, no one thought that could be done by a child. In fact, most pharaohs who came to power young (as in, even a young teen) had a regent of some sort working for or with them. More often than not, this regent was their mother. Examples of this are:

Old Kingdom

  1. Shepses-kaf - came to the throne as a child and had his mother (Khenty-Kaus I) rule in his place for many years ([History Podcast episode 9](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-9-she-is-foremost/))
  2. Niuserre - came to the throne as a young teen and his mother (Khenty-Kaus II) acted as a regent during his early years ([History Podcast episode 13](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-13-the-hairdressers-cometh/))
  3. Peppy II - came to the throne at age 6 and had his mother act as regent until he came of age. He was ruling in earnest by his early 20s ([History Podcast episode 21](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-21-the-excited-child/))



New Kingdom

  1. Ahmose - came to the throne around age 10 and had his mother (Ah-hotep) guide him until he came of age. He was fully established by 21 ([History Podcast episode 56](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-56-the-return-of-the-king/))
  2. Amunhotep I - came to the throne around age six and had his mother (Ahmose-Nefertari) and grandmother (Ah-hotep) act as some form of regents for him. He began to take a more active role around 14 ([History Podcast episode 57](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-57-all-things-good-and-pure/))



As interesting as all that is, it does raise a rather obvious question: when did children come of age in ancient Egypt?

There’s actually not a great answer to that question. The Egyptian’s didn’t seem to have a sweet sixteen or anything so formal. Instead, their coming of age was called “tying on the headband” and, as best I can tell, that happened when those around you deemed you worthy or when you’d mastered your chosen craft. There was an age range for this, though. It definitely happened by the time you hit your 20s and appears to have been possible as young as 14 since that’s when Amunhotep I started doing things like leading military campaigns. It’s also the age that we think Peppy II started having children.

Now, while I just spent all that time talking about pharaohs, the real person of interest here is Seti. He was supposedly appointed by Akhenamkhanen. This means that, at the time of Akhenamkhanen’s death, Seti would have had to have been old enough to be seen as an adult capable of serving in a high-ranking position. It’s incredibly unlikely that he’d go straight from child to high priest at the youngest age possible (14), so he was likely at least 17 before this happened. That mean’s Atemu couldn’t have been the pharaoh for more than three years.

If Atemu came to power right after Seti was appointed, though, it’s likely that Atemu would have had a regent ruling in his place as he would have been 12 or 13. We see no sign of that, so that makes it likely that he couldn’t have been younger than 14, though it is possible that he had a regent and we just don’t see it.

So there you have it. A reign of maybe three years is possible with Atemu really only stepping into the role of pharaoh for the last one to two years of his reign.

Of course, this is all going off of the manga. The anime doesn’t give us anything close to that level of range.

You see, the manga doesn’t have a coronation ceremony. The anime does.

While Atemu would have been the pharaoh basically as soon as his father died via that whole “appearing in glory” thing, the coronation ceremony would not have formally taken place until well  _ after  _ the king was buried. It takes a while to plan a party that big and you don’t start planning until the last pharaoh is dead. This means that there’s usually a several month gap between becoming the pharaoh and throwing the party to celebrate it.

The party didn’t take place on a random day, either. Traditionally, coronations took place on the first days of one of the three seasons. Those seasons were the flooding season, the planting season, and the harvest season. The flooding one was preferred since that was the new year and also the time when the least work was going on, but any of the three would do.

What all this means is that, if we’re going by the anime, Atemu could only have been in power for a few months. I said eight, but even that might be generous. For my part, I’m going with about 4 months. Do with that what you will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:
> 
> Additional Egyptian History Podcast Episodes:  
> [Mini Episode: Inauguration Day](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/mini-episode-inauguration-day/) (This is all about how succession worked for pharaohs)  
> [Episode 56c: A Royal Funeral](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-56-c-a-royal-funeral//) (This is all about the death of the first king of the New Kingdom)  
> [Episode 33: Revivals and Regencies](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-33-revivals-and-regencies/) (Talks about the "appearing in glory")  
> [Episode 35: From Father to Son](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-35-from-father-to-son/) (Also Talks about the "appearing in glory")
> 
> The lecture "Mummification: How We Know What We Know" by Bob Brier from the Great Courses Series "The History of Ancient Egypt" (this is the same series that I got my info on magic from!)


	9. Wadjet and Her So-Called Eye

This entry in our notes is similar to my Atem vs Atemu section in that it's not really addressing something you're going to see in the fic. It's more addressing why you're **_not_ **going to see something in the fic. In other words, this is more of a fun fact entry than anything else.

Soooo, we hear the name ”Wadjet” a lot in the show. More specifically, the eye symbol associated with the millennium items is called “the eye of Wadjet” and the shrine where the ancient Egyptians kept their duel monsters was the “shrine of Wadjet”. To the average watcher, this is probably a random word that has no meaning and sounds like something magic that is unique to the items.

It’s not.

Wadjet was the cobra goddess of a city called Buto in the Nile Delta. She was also a major symbol of royal power in the northern part of Egypt. One of her jobs was to preserve royal authority. You’ve actually probably seen her image since her symbol, the Uraeus, was worn on several pharaonic headdresses ([example a](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_III#/media/File:Weihrauchopfer_RamsesIII_aus_KV11.jpg)/[example b](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uraeus#/media/File:Mask_of_Tutankhamun_2003-12-07.jpg)). If you followed that first link, you may have noticed that the khepresh (blue crown or war crown) that Ramses III is wearing looks suspiciously like the headdress worn by Priest Seto in the anime/manga. This is because Priest Seto’s outfit is **_WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS_ ** ! That’s not the topic of these notes, so that’s all I’ll say for now. We will come back to it though. Oh, yes, we will come back to _that_.

So, Wadjet! More specifically, her eye.

While her most common portrayal was as a cobra, she also could appear as a lioness in her role as “eye of ra”. Yeah, she was associated with Ra and, to some extent, Horus because the “eye of wadjet” appears to just be another name for the eye of Horus. Seriously, look up “eye of Wadjet” on google and the first result is the “Eye of Horus” Wikipedia article which starts “[the Eye of Horus, also known as wadjet, wedjat or udjat, is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection, royal power, and good health.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Horus)”

In other words, the mysterious eye that is supposedly a symbol of the millennium items is really just the eye of Horus. I don’t know if they called it “the eye of Wadjet” just to make it sound neat or what, but it’s nothing unique to the millennium items unless the original Japanese called it something else and it got translated weirdly.

Either way, none of this makes any sense to me so I’m scrapping all of it! Not sure if I’m going to acknowledge this in the fic yet, but the basic idea I’m probably going to go with is that the items had the eye of Horus added to them for added protection when they were created. Which is believable as it symbolized protection and who doesn’t want a little extra protecting? The eye of Horus is not going to be treated as a meaningful part of how the items function.

Similarly, don’t expect to hear the term “shrine of Wadjet”. I’ll probably just call it “the millennium shrine” or something similar since I’m trying to avoid going too far off book in this fic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> [The Egyptian History Podcast Episode 43: Dominion Over All](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-43-dominion-over-all/) (this isn’t a super meaningful source, but the narrator specifically refers to the eye of Horus as the eye of Wadjet here and that is what sent me down this rabbit hole of wait, that’s not a Yu-Gi-Oh thing?) 
> 
> The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses by George Hart (I like this book quite a bit in that it gives little blurbs on every God/Goddess that was known when it was written. Most books just talk about the big ones, which is annoying. However, the author doesn’t go into a ton of depth, so it’s mostly just good as a starting point to get names and a basic idea of who was who. It’s not a single source for all of your Egyptian mythology needs.)


	10. Insert Angry Rant (The Ba & The Ka)

Before we get into the good stuff, allow me to provide you with a brief refresher of how Yu-Gi-Oh defines the terms "Ba" and "Ka". Note that these are manga screen caps, so you'll want to read from right to left!

Okay, refresher done! Angry rant mode go, go go!!!

* * *

Normally I'd have two separate "chapters" here. One would be about the ba, the other would be about the ka. Why? BECAUSE THESE ARE TWO SEPERATE ENTITIES! Like, what is this nonsense? The ba nourishes the ka??? The ka is a reflection of your true nature??? **_Nooooooooo_**. Incorrect!

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for taking liberties with lore to make something cool. That's literally what _I'm_ doing. However, there's taking liberties and then there's completely reimagining to the point of unrecognizability. If you're going to use Egyptian beliefs, _use Egyptian beliefs_. Don't take random Egyptian words and use them for completely different things than they actually were.

Okay, enough of that, let's actually talk about what these things are so that you may share in my rage. We're going to do that one concept at a time because, while the original ties these things together, they really did have almost nothing to do with each other. Both _were_ parts of a person's soul, but remember, for an Egyptian, the soul was a collection of parts. Each was vital to your survival in both this life and the next, but that doesn't mean that they all fed off each other. To give you an analogy, if I asked you to think of all of the things that a person needs to stay alive, you might list off food, water, and shelter. Each of those is vital to your survival, but each does a completely different thing and can still do it even if the other two are missing. This is largely how the Egyptian concept of the soul seems to have worked. Many parts, all required, but each with a task mostly separate from the rest.

* * *

**The Ba**

Ancient Egyptian for ~~life force~~ **your personality/character**.

Yeah, it's more complicated than that, but if you want a one sentence summary, that's it. The ba was the thing that represented who you were in the truest sense. It's also the part that's most similar to our modern concept of a soul or ghost.

Unlike ghosts, which are usually shown as exact replicas of their owner's living form, the ba was depicted as a creature with a human head and the body of bird. This bird could go out and travel around this world and the next. If a person believed that someone was exacting revenge on them from the great beyond, that avenging was assumed to be done by the ba.

Because it had the ability to travel, the ba was the part of the soul responsible for taking your ib ("heart") to be weighed on the scales of Ma'at. Note, the ba was NOT the ib itself (that's a different part of the soul). It was just the means of transport.

Having now gone over all of that, do remember that, for the most part, the ba didn't become its own thing until a person died. Without your ba, you're not you, so it stayed firmly inside you until it was time to leave this world. This is why Marik calls the "soul room" the "seat of the ba". If it reflects your personality, the Egyptians would likely think that it had something to do with your ba or that which would become your ba in death. They might also think that your ib was involved, but that's a different part of the soul and we'll get to it later.

* * *

**The Ka**

Ancient Egyptian for your spirit **or vital force**.

Yugioh claims that the ba nourishes the ka. If anything, it's the ka that does the nourishing. It also doesn't nourish the ba. It nourishes your mummy in death and your body in life.

The ancient Egyptians believed that things like food, water, and clothing were still needed after you died. The part of your soul responsible for acquiring these things was the ka. It was believed that your ka could separate from your mummy, acquire sustenance, and then return. Note that the ka couldn't go wandering off on long journeys to get this stuff. The ka was very much tied to your body and really just hung around your tomb and associated mortuary temple (if you were rich enough to have one). This is why tombs were often called "the house of the ka".

The sustenance acquired by the ka would not be physical in nature. It would be a spiritual equivalent. For example, if you went to the mortuary temple of a dead pharaoh, you might see the priests make an offering of food and drink to a statue of the pharaoh, then they'd take that offering and eat it or distribute it to others. They'd do the same with clothing. These rituals weren't just for show, it was how the ka was provided for. It was believed that the ka would come and magically take spiritual nourishment from these items, then return to the mummy and pass that nourishment along.

Of course, not everyone could afford such elaborate rituals and you didn't want to rely on your cult as the only way to survive. Luckily, the ka could be nourished in other ways. The Egyptians seemed to have believed that paintings or status of food and drink could also nourish the ka, which is why you might see tombs decorated with pictures of farmers harvesting grain or butchers killing animals. These were there to make sure that the ka had ways to sustain itself.

Appearance wise, the ka was basically your spiritual double and, unlike the ba, the ka came into being at the same time as you did. That's why I said it nourished your body in both life and death. While the ka went out and got you food after you died, in life, it gave you the ability to speak and breath and eat and all that good stuff. That's why "vital force" is probably a better translation than "spirit" because, while it may look like you, it's not you in terms of character. In fact, the ka doesn't have a character. It just is.

This makes that whole "god ka" and "demon ka" thing that I quoted up above look pretty silly. The ka was not good or evil. It didn't have any defining features regarding a personality, that was the ba. It also had nothing to do with whether or not your actions in life summed up as good or evil, that was the ib ("heart"). Once again, more on that later.

As far as my fic goes, I am playing around with the ka a bit by having the gang be able to use their ka to travel around. The reason why I feel comfortable doing that is that they're not going far from their bodies, so it's okay. I'm also **_not_ **giving the ka a personality. The reason it seems to have one is that their souls aren't broken up like they would be in traditional death, so I'm fudging it a bit and saying that a complete soul can control its ka. Is that true to Egyptian beliefs? Probably not, but the ka is the closest thing that the Egyptians have to a spirit so that's what I have to go with for the soul room hijinks and transparent spirits. It's not like I'm making their ka turn into a monster and then claiming that people can separate that monster from its owner's body. That would be silly and also **_kill them_**.

Did I mention that the way the manga did duel monsters is wrong? Because it's SO WRONG.

Bleh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:
> 
> The ba and the ka are such ubiquitous things in Egyptology that it's hard to give a great source here. Both are discussed in the lecture series and the podcast that I often quote as sources, but they're not the kind of discussions that I can link to because there's not a single lecture about these topics. Instead, they come up constantly in little quotes or asides. The more you read up on Egypt, the better your understanding of the ba and the ka will be and, even then, they're hard to summarize well. I will give you some specific sources, but note that not everything I brought up comes from there. Some of it is just what I've learned from listening to dozens of hours of Egyptology lectures.
> 
> [This video is a pretty decent summary of the concept of the ba.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WzvPOOx_fk)
> 
> [And this one goes over the ka.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGU0RkIm2g)
> 
> "Gods. Rites. Rituals, and Religion of Ancient Egypt" by Lucia Gahlin
> 
> "Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt" by Salima Ikram


	11. Ancient Egyptian Male Fashion

Could I have just stuck Atemu in his cannon clothing? Absolutely. I even initially started to do that. Then I felt bad because I was pretty sure that it wasn’t accurate so HERE WE ARE. -.- Before we get into this, know that clothing is one of the hardest things to research when it comes to ancient cultures. Cloth deteriorates pretty quickly, so a lot of what we know (or think we know) comes from things like paintings or statues. Sure, some stuff survived in the tombs of Pharaohs and the like, but a lot of it didn’t. That means there’s some guesswork involved and the further back in time you go, the less we know.

On with the show!

Egypt is hot during the day most of the year, so pretty much everything they wore was light and airy. A lot of it was sheer, too, meaning that you could see right through it. As you might guess, this means modesty wasn’t a huge deal. Most people didn’t even wear clothing until they hit puberty, which leads you to have a pretty laissez-faire attitude about someone seeing you naked.

So why wear clothing at all?

The answer to that is status. The things you wore showed how wealthy you were or how special your job was. For example, overseers are depicted wearing starched linen kilts. These kilts would have limited their movement in many ways, which was the whole point. They were an overseer. They didn’t need to be able to bend over to harvest wheat or lift bricks. That was the job of the workers or slaves that they were watching over.

I use the term “kilt” above for sake of clarity and in the chapter I just published I called it a “skirt”. That’s because this is how people often refer to this garment for sake of clarity. The actual, Egyptian term for this thing, though, is “shendyt”. A shendyt was a linen cloth that went around the waist and was the most standard outfit for Egyptian men.

During the New Kingdom, shendyts usually fell below the knee if you were upper class. It also wasn’t uncommon to see them decorated with embroidery or beading if you had the money for such things. If you were poor, you’d just have a simple shendyt without any embellishments. After all, you were working all day. Why spend all that money on something that’s just going to get dirty?

That wasn’t all you wore, though! By the time of the New Kingdom, the Egyptians had actually developed rather advanced underwear. I’m literally just going to quote my source here, because I find this whole passage amazing for so many reasons:

 _Underwear was also developed further during this period, evolving from the rough, triangular loincloth wrapped between the legs and around the waist to a finer piece of cloth either sewn to a certain waist size or tied at the hips. Upper-class men's fashion in the New Kingdom was this underwear beneath a loincloth over which was worn a long sheer shirt falling to the knees, a broad neck piece (for nobility), bracelets, and sandals. King Tutankhamun (c. 1336-c.1327 BCE) was buried with_ **_over 100_ ** _of this kind of underwear as well as shirts, jackets, kilts, and cloaks, providing some of the best examples of New Kingdom fashion yet found._

Amazing.

This paragraph is one of my main templates for Atemu’s outfit, which I kept as close to cannon as possible for visualization purposes. I even left him his cloak because those were things that you’d see people wearing if it was cold. While an animal skin cloak or a white cloak may have been more accurate, I just changed it from purple to blue and left it at that.

This is where I should note that dying your clothes wasn’t common. That’s why tomb paintings almost always show people in white. However, the color blue was associated with the kings as the color of their war crown (possibly because blue was associated with protection). [There’s also this cool image of Ramses II with blue and green straps on his chest. ](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/ramesses-ii-in-battle-ricardmn-photography.html)So, yeah, you can have a dyed cloak, Atemu. Just not purple. That wasn't really a common color in Egypt and it wasn't associated with royalty like it is in the modern day. That strappy thing Ramses is wearing is also my template for Atemu’s shirt!

What, he died at night? Do you know how cold deserts can get? He gets a shirt and a cloak.

I tried really hard to find good pictures of this stuff, but I couldn’t find much and I finally said, “it’s not a visual medium, what I’ve got is good enough!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:
> 
> [Fashion & Dress in Ancient Egypt](https://www.ancient.eu/article/1037/fashion--dress-in-ancient-egypt/) This was my primary source and really gives you everything you need to know.
> 
> [Color in Ancient Egypt](https://www.ancient.eu/article/999/color-in-ancient-egypt/) For those of you who want to know more about what colors were most common in Egypt and what they meant.
> 
> [THE ULTIMATE FASHION HISTORY - Ancient Egypt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VY7C_Wa6DI) A good source if you just want a really quick intro, plus the narrator is British and hilarious. The only thing that I found somewhat inaccurate is what she says about being clean shaven. While some sources say this, I think they tend to be older ones? More recent stuff I’ve viewed indicates that shaved heads weren’t a golden standard, though they were common. Idk, just know that point's up for debate.
> 
> [Makeup and Beauty in Ancient Egypt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTsHMM6M8Dc&t=1472s) I didn’t even really use this source, but I adore this video and it's relevant to this topic, so here you go!


	12. The Heart of the Matter (The Ib/Ab)

By now you’ve probably realized that the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul was freaking complex. I mean, this is the fifth part we’ve talked about and we’re  _ not  _ done yet. We’ve got at least one part left, though depending on the text you look at, it could be as many as four. Isn’t that incredible? Anyway, let’s get this show on the road and talk about the ib (also called the ab in some translations).

Most of the time, this word gets translated as “heart”, which is fair. It was, in part, your physical heart. However, the ancient Egyptian’s weren’t amazing at anatomy. They didn’t realize that the heart was just a thing that pumped blood. They thought it was even more important than that. They thought it was your brain. This is why you will sometimes hear “ib” translated to “mind” instead of heart because it was both. It’s also why the Egyptians associated the heart with thought, memory, and emotion.

For those of you familiar with the Egyptian mythology surrounding your heart getting weighed on a scale, this may have just been a major “ah-ha” moment for you. It certainly was for me. For those of you unfamiliar with that legend, let’s talk about it! Not just because it’s cool, but because this myth is the basis for the millennium scales in both the show and my fic.

According to Egyptian beliefs, when you died, your heart was taken before the god Osiris (Lord of the afterlife) and a couple other deities. Once there, you basically went on trial and performed a thing called the negative confession. This was where you listed all of the bad things you had  _ not  _ done in life. To be clear, you didn’t just come up with random bad stuff you hadn’t done. There was a specific list of things that were considered bad that you confessed to not doing. After that little ceremony was over, your heart was taken and placed on one side of a giant pair of scales. A feather was placed on the other side.

This feather was the embodiment of truth and justice also known as Ma’at. 

In Egyptian mythology, a word can be both a concept and a deity. Ma’at is one such word. It could mean either a goddess or this universal concept of order that all Egyptians strove to uphold. One of the most important parts of the pharaoh’s job was upholding Ma’at in order to fight against the forces of chaos and keep harmony in Egypt. Hopefully the main fic’s title now makes sense to you! (Just let me pretend I’m clever, okay?)

Anyway, back to the whole weighing of the heart.

If your heart was found to weigh less than or the same as the feather of Ma’at, then you were deemed worthy of the afterlife. Your soul was now allowed to go to the fields of Iaru and live in happiness for all eternity. If your heart was found to weigh more than the feather, then you were deemed unworthy of the afterlife and your heart was eaten by a creature named Ammit or “the gobbler”. Once your heart was consumed, you ceased to exist. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than hell. Probably better, but I can see arguments to the contrary.

This void creating creature was what we would now call a chimera, meaning a creature that appears to be made of several others. It had the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the backside of a hippo. Probably because these were three of the biggest threats to humans in Egypt, especially the crocodile and the hippo. You’ll sometimes see Ammit shown as just a crocodile in modern stuff, but that’s not true to Egyptian beliefs as far as I’ve seen.

Now, before someone calls me out on this, I want to remind you of something I said in the second chapter of these notes: beliefs change, lore evolves. There can be multiple versions of the same myth and one isn’t any more true than the other (provided you’re getting them all from an original Egyptian source). If you’ve heard this same story, but with Anubis taking the place of Osiris, you’re not wrong. Both are legitimate versions of the tale as far as I can tell, but the Osiris one is the one used in both of my sources and it appears to be the one favored in the New Kingdom, so it’s the one I’m going with since I don’t have a great source for the Anubis one other than Wikipedia. I've definitely heard it elsewhere, though. Probably in older lore because Osiris became more and more important to Egyptian mythology as time went on. In the early days, he actually was pretty minor god.

Moving on!

Because the heart was considered so incredibly important, the Egyptians did a lot to ensure it survived into death. Unlike most internal organs, which were removed during the embalming process, the heart was left inside the body. It was only removed to be taken to this heart weighing ceremony and, after the ceremony was done, your heart was returned to you. There are even spells in the book of the dead that focus on ensuring that your heart is returned and never again removed.

Given all that, I’d say it’s pretty reasonable that the holder of the millennium scales would be able to do some pretty cool magic involving memories. Hopefully you agree.

One final note. In our notes on the ren (“name”), I mentioned that it too had something to do with memory. What exactly that was isn’t super clear, so I’m going to be taking some liberties with how the ib and then ren interact in the coming chapters. I don’t think I’m doing anything too out there, but know that it may not be as true to Egyptian beliefs as I hope it is. If something isn’t in these notes, it’s really just my best-guess effort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources
> 
> Gods, Rites, Rituals, and Religion of Ancient Egypt by Lucia Gahlin (Most of the stuff in this chapter I wrote from memory alone, but I then fact-checked myself against this book to make sure I wasn’t making anything up by accident. If you want a fun quick reference guide for a lot of elements of Egyptian mythology and lore, this book rocks!)
> 
> [The Egyptian Afterlife & The Feather of Truth](https://www.ancient.eu/article/42/the-egyptian-afterlife--the-feather-of-truth/) (I didn’t use this one too much, but I like this site and I like to throw in website references if I can since finding a specific book can be challenging.)
> 
> [The Heart in Ancient Egypt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wnekXqX4E0&ab_channel=VoicesofAncientEgypt) \- a quick video on the heart and how it worked in Egyptian mythology  
>    
>  [This 5 minute video is a good overview of Ma'at as a concept and a goddess](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR3iGnl25A4&ab_channel=VoicesofAncientEgypt)


	13. Mortuary Cults (and Tattoos)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, just fyi, I posted two note sections today so be sure you read both if you want to!

Can we all take a moment to appreciate how terrible the tomb keepers were at their job? They’re supposed to protect Atemu’s tomb, yet Sugoroku was able to waltz right in and take the puzzle without issue. 

Like, what? 

Even if that act was destiny and they were supposed to just let it happen, you’d think they’d then follow him to keep tabs on the artifact. I mean, the whole purpose of their order is to assist Atemu when he returns, yet they didn’t even seem to know when that happened? Like Shadi sees the puzzle and isn’t even remotely fazed. Just, they’re weird and confusing and I’m changing them up a bit.

First, let’s talk about what the tomb keepers actually are from a historic perspective. 

The idea of a family being charged with the care and maintenance of a pharaoh’s tomb isn’t weird. If anything, it’s _ kind-of _ standard. See, pharaohs and certain other wealthy or important individuals had things called mortuary cults.

In our section on the ka, we talked about how the Egyptian’s believed that your soul needed sustenance after death. In our section on the ren, we talked about how a person’s memory needed preservation through the continued utterance of their name in order for them to have a good afterlife. One of the big ways in which these things were done was that you would take a section of land and legally tie it to your mortuary temple. This gave you a way to pay people to work there after you died. These temple workers would provide the sustenance for your ka, take care of the temple, and help preserve your memory.

As a brief refresher, the mortuary temple was essentially the part of the tomb that was open to the public. For much of Egyptian history, a tomb and its associated mortuary temple were basically side by side, but by the New Kingdom, the elites had realized this just made it easier for robbers to find their tombs. This lead to mortuary temples often being built some ways away from the tombs that they were associated with. Close enough that the ka could still get to them, but far enough away that it wasn’t obvious where the tomb actually was.

The individuals who worked in these mortuary temples were called either ka priests (those who did the rituals) or lector priests (those who read sacred texts). These priests weren’t necessarily tied to a single cult. There’s actually evidence that temples would have their priests take on these roles on a rotating basis in order to provide for the temple’s needs since anyone who worked as a ka or lector priest would be entitled to some of the produce of the land tied to the mortuary temple in question. We’re not going to get into that in detail, just know that this is another complex topic well worth looking into if you’re super curious. Also know that the priest cast was more complex than you might think. It wasn’t even really a thing until pretty late in Egyptian history.

The big takeaway here is that, as far as the original show is concerned, the Ishtars and whatever Shadi was would likely be considered a mortuary cult, not “tomb keepers”, though I can see why someone would choose the later term. “Tomb keeper” is pretty self-explanatory, “mortuary cult” is not. Also, while being a priest had something of a hereditary nature by the New Kingdom, a mortuary cult wasn’t really a family affair as far as I can tell. That being said, I don’t think anyone would be too suspicious of a family taking on the role. They might not even notice because there were so many of the things.

Of course, this is just how the group would have hidden themselves in the day of the pharaohs. By the time we get to my fic, this has all changed. This is arguably one of my biggest changes to cannon, so let’s talk about it briefly.

The way the Ishtars live in cannon makes all of 0 sense to me in many ways. 

First of all, Egypt isn’t some backwater where you can just live underground and no one will notice unless you’re in the middle of the desert, which they’re not. They’re within walking distance of a town, which is also portrayed a little weird. While Egypt the country is almost all desert, the places where the people live are very much green because they still live along the Nile. This is [Cairo](https://cdn.kimkim.com/files/a/content_articles/featured_photos/468b409b71c120bacfe4416f272cff166c4eadd5/big-173759f14285b3f970a963464a88cd82.jpg). This is [Luxor](https://afktravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/shutterstock_87292120.jpg) (where the fic is set).  The country is modern.

Yeah, if you watch a historical documentary you mostly see sand and barren, rocky ground, but that’s because the ancient Egyptians let the Nile river flood each year, meaning all of their buildings were built on the edge of the floodplain. The Nile doesn’t flood anymore due to the Aswan dam, so Egypt is now even more built on the Nile than it used to be and that floodplain has turned into cities.

Beyond just the whole weirdness of the geography and underground living, there’s the social aspect. This cult’s purpose is to do something when the pharaoh returns. To do this, they’d have to have a place that the pharaoh’s stuff could be kept without it being disturbed. In other words, they’d need power in a societal sense. They’d need to own lands and have the ability to keep people away. This is why they upgraded from underground weirdness to reasonably wealthy luxury. I don’t address it in the fic, but Marik and Ishizu grew up with expensive private tutors teaching them all manners of stuff from languages to political manipulation tactics. Basically, I made them useful. (Yeah, I went there. Even the show had to make Ishizu someone in the government. They should have been doing this kind of stuff from the start!)

For our final bit of these notes, we need to talk about tattoos.

While the original version of the show/manga have the tomb keepers  _ carving things into people’s flesh, _ that’s very much  **not** an Egyptian thing. If someone was going to have something permanently placed on their skin, they would have  **_just gotten a tattoo_ ** . Yes, those were a thing even then. They were made by placing charcoal under the skin much like one would place ink nowadays. It probably was not a pleasant process, but it would have been far better than carving flesh and carried a far smaller risk  **_of death_ ** .

Hopefully these changes are cool with you guys and if not, well, oops?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> [The Egyptian History Podcast](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/): I don't have a single episode to source you guys for mortuary cults. They're talked about constantly so either take my word on it or go listen to all 100+ episodes like I did. :P
> 
> [ This video talks about all sorts of makeup and beauty topics related to ancient Egypt, including tattoos. I’ve set the timestamp to the bit about tattoos, but the whole discussion is fun! ](https://youtu.be/CTsHMM6M8Dc?t=1354)


	14. Love, Marriage, and Homosexuality

At 16 and as a newly crowned pharaoh, Atemu was prime marrying age. With a life-expectancy of only about 45-years and with children seen as super important, the Egyptians married young. Basically as soon as a man became self-sufficient, he was able (and expected!) to get a wife. Women could get married starting in their early teens, probably based on reaching sexual maturity.

However, because I made it that Atemu wasn’t pharaoh until the recent past and because he’s still rather young, it’s believable that he wouldn’t be married _yet_. It would definitely be something people wanted him to do soon, though. There would be a lot of pressure from advisors and family members for him to pick a wife and I do mean pick. While arranged marriages weren a thing back then, they weren’t the rule of the day. My book on Ramses II even says “Ramses’ father.. surrounded him with young women at an early age to give him (and them) a chance to [get to know each other and see if they were suited to marriage.]” 

Was love required? No. It wasn’t unheard of to have a love marriage, but those were more of a peasant thing than a noble thing. Compatibility seems to have been the more pressing concern. It’s unlikely that anyone could force an adult pharaoh to marry someone he didn’t like, but he would have been aware of how acceptable any choice he made was.

Would there have been expectations? Yes, while Atemu technically held all the power, he would still be expected to pick at least one “suitable” wife, meaning a woman of royal blood or high social standing. This woman would be his “first royal wife” or "great royal wife". If he really wanted to be with someone “unsuitable”, he could have them as a lesser wife or concubine. Obviously he could defy all that and make a commoner the “first royal wife”, but it would probably have caused issues and upset social order (a fundamental part of Ma’at). I don’t think any pharaoh ever did this as far as we know.

The obvious next question from the perspective of my fic is: but what if he wanted a husband?

This is where things get complicated. For an Egyptian, the point of marriage seems to have been to share property and have children. Many texts encourage people to marry young for just this reason. Because of this, the idea of two men or two women **_marrying_ ** doesn’t appear to be a thing.

That doesn’t mean that homosexuality was taboo, though. We have literally no evidence of it being illegal.

As for evidence of it being accepted, well, there is one big piece of physical evidence that scholars debate over. This evidence is a tomb where two men were buried together in the style usually reserved for married couples. The tomb dates to the 5th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom (over 1000 years before Atemu) and the men’s names are Nyankh-khnum and Khnum-hotep. Throughout their shared tomb, images of the two embracing are found everywhere along with the standard, everyday images that usually depict husbands and wives going around their lives. It’s also worth noting that these two were members of the royal court, thus their rather elaborate tomb. That’s evidence that, if this was a romantic relationship, then homosexuality was at least tolerated.

The one weird part of this tale? The tomb walls also depict images of their wives and children.

You do have to wonder how that worked. Were the wives okay with it? They had to be on some level since divorce was a thing in Ancient Egypt and it didn’t favor men or women. Both parties left the marriage with personal property and could later remarry.

Because these two men were clearly married to women and because the tomb doesn’t call them husbands or the like, there’s debate on if these two were in love or not. It seems like they were and the podcast in my sources goes into all the detail as to why, but it’s just educated guesswork. That means it’s going to be heavily biased by personal opinion. There are scholars who argue that these two were actually conjoined twins, not lovers. Others argue close brothers. There’s no definitive proof one way or the other. I think that the evidence is clear that it was two men in love, but what do I know?

The podcast about these two also specifically addresses the topic of a gay pharaoh. Sadly for us shippers, there is no evidence that one existed. If they did, then they still did their duty and entered a heterosexual marriage or five in order to produce an heir. This would have been Atemu’s fate too had he lived beyond the first few months of his reign. He might have been able to have a male concubine or lover on the side (once again, there's no evidence of this being a thing, but that doesn't mean it wasn't), but he wouldn’t have had a “first royal husband” instead of a “first royal wife”.

Speaking of lovers, it’s seems worth mentioning that the Egyptians were very laissez-faire about sex outside of marriage. **_Cheating_ **was bad, but as long as both people were single, it wasn’t an issue. Even illegitimate kids don't seem to have been stigmatized, probably because women could own property and the like. For example, one of my sources mentions a case where a woman disinherited some of her kids, but mentions that they were still allowed to be given stuff by her husband since he had his own property.

This sexual freedom may be why the sex industry wasn’t much of a thing in Egypt. There’s no evidence of brothels or prostitution. This kind of thing probably existed, but nothing like you see in places such as Greece.

This is starting to run long, so I’m just gonna do a quick “fun fact” list of the few other things I wanted to cover and then call it a day:

  1. Egyptians didn’t have weddings. How marriage worked was that a man who had established himself offered to let the object of his affections move in with him and, if she did, that meant they were married!
  2. Proper care for your spouse was part of Ma’at, so abuse was frowned upon. Men were encouraged to respect their wives.
  3. Marrying your siblings, half-siblings, children (yikes), and first cousins was only really common among the royalty and the gods.
  4. The concept of multiple wives was pretty much limited to the pharaoh. Most Egyptian were monogamous, even the gods! I’ve not seen any evidence of multiple husbands anywhere, but there are references to men having a concubine in addition to their wife. Not sure how common that was, but it probably wasn't common to see unless the person in question had enough money to support multiple women.
  5. Since marriage was only heterosexual, it's hard to know how common homosexuality was and if Atemu would be familiar with it outside of the myth of Seth vs Horus. There are multiple versions of the myth that include a part about the two men sleeping together. Some versions have it as non-consensual, others as consensual, but still problematic. Either way, this is a myth that Egyptian children would probably know, so most Egyptians would likely have at least been familiar with the _idea_ of two men being together sexually. Because of this, I can at least say that an accurate Atemu wouldn't be confused by the idea. How comfortable he is with it applying to him will depend on how innocent you make him to the ways of love.



So there you have it. Atemu could be married with kids or single and ready to mingle. Both would be appropriate given his age, but the longer you have him rule, the less appropriate it is to have him be single.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:
> 
> [Daily Life in Ancient Egypt (Ancient Egyptian Family Life)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU1kl28Pds&ab_channel=VoicesofAncientEgypt) \- a quick video on the topic of average family life/marriage
> 
> Ramses II by Mark A. Simpkins and Susan Taylor
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast: Episode 13: The Hairdressers Cometh](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-13-the-hairdressers-cometh/) \- have a listen and see what you think: lovers or conjoined twins? The LGBT+ stuff is in the second half of the episode if you're just curious about that.
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast: Episode 3: Horus vs Seth](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-3-stairway-to-heavenn/) \- a recounting of one of the less problematic versions of Seth vs Horus
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast: Mini Episode: Happy Valentines](https://play.acast.com/s/egyptianhistorypodcast/miniepisode-happyvalentines) \- a general discussion of love and relationships in ancient Egypt, including potential lesbians!


	15. Egyptian Spells and the Concept of Possession

This section of my notes is mostly an explanation on why you’re  _ not  _ seeing a lot of spoken spells in my story. There will also be a brief discussion about why ‘duel monsters’ act as separate entities instead of as some sort of possessing force like they were in cannon.

Egyptian spells often read like poetry. We already talked about the spell written on shabti, but let’s look at another one from the “book of the dead”. Side note, “book of the dead” is a modern term, not an ancient one. Check out the video in my sources if you want to know more.

Back to the spells!

The following spell was all about making sure that your heart was found pure when it was weighed on the scales of Ma’at:

“ _ O my heart which I had from my mother, O my heart which I had upon earth, do not rise up against me as a witness in the presence of the Lord of Things; do not speak against me concerning what I have done, do not bring up against me anything I have done in the presence of the Great God, Lord of the West. _ ”

See what I mean about poetry? While you can probably figure out what the spell does, it’s very flowery and long. It doesn’t even use the names of the gods. It uses their epithets (basically a title or characteristic). For the curious, I think that the Lord of Things is Amun and I know that the Lord of the West is Osiris.

Here’s an excerpt from another spell. This one is supposed to protect a man named Mutemheb against some sort of evil spirit (this is from the lecture in the sources and the professor says she’s not completely sure what this was protecting against):

“ _ Oh male enemy, o female enemy, oh male dead, oh female dead, oh opponent who comes in order to attack Mutemheb, born from Isis, during night, during day, and in every moment. You will be destroyed in your tomb. You will be persecuted with violence and a net will be placed against you in the sky, and Seth will be against you on earth...' _

Once again, we have a multi-sentence spell with lots of flowery language. I cut this one off because it goes on for a while and gets a little confusing, so I just stuck with the part that’s easy to follow along with. By the way, this isn’t even close to the longest spell I’ve seen. These things could basically be short stories.

As you can see, if you want to make an Egyptian spell, it’s not gonna be like the simple things we favor today. Because of this and my desire to not make something inaccurate, I mostly gloss over what the Ishtars are doing when they’re reciting spells. I also have them do it in ancient Egyptian because, as you’ve seen with our discussions of the soul, translations aren’t always exact and the spells they’re using aren’t ones they created. Why would they use anything but Egyptian? Don’t fix what ain’t broke just so that the audience can follow along!

Which brings up another question: how accurate is this memory world spell?

About as accurate as duel monsters, which means not very. Most Egyptian magic for the living was focused on protecting people or healing people. There were also spells meant to hurt others, but they don’t appear to be supper common. The big example that I know of is execration texts (a practice involving writing the names of your enemies on something and then smashing it to help defeat them). Spells involving things like transforming your appearance were meant for use in the afterlife. There were undoubtedly other types of magic, but the majority of spells appear to fall under one of the categories listed above.

The only type of illegal magic I’ve come across wasn’t even an illegal spell or branch of magic. All spells appear to be fair game. What was illegal was using spells with negative effects against a specific target: the pharaoh. Attacking the pharaoh was equivalent to attacking the gods and order itself. It was also verboten to attack Egypt, but I’ve never seen anything like weather magic or the like, so I’m not sure what that means.

As you can see, nothing in there is close to a spell that would create a metaphysical world. There’s definitely not magic to create whatever the heck the weird game thing in the manga was. Did anyone else find that thing confusing? Because it was super confusing. At least the show made it a shadow game world thing. The manga has it be a physical RPG game that the thief king made in the back room of the museum. It was… odd.

There also doesn’t seem to be magic that deals with summoning things. 

While the Egyptians had concepts some people might liken to demons, these creatures were either good/neutral guardian figures who you could ask for help or bad figures that brought sickness or nightmares. No matter if the creature was good or bad, there was no magic to control them and make them attack others. The closest thing to that concept that I’ve seen is magic to cast out a creature causing sickness or magic to protect from nightmares. The idea of an evil spirit possessing someone and making them do something bad? Not a thing in Egypt. Doesn’t mean you won’t be seeing something like it in the story, but just know, if you do, it’s me ignoring what we know of Egyptian beliefs instead of honoring them. My only defence is that Yugioh did it first and I can’t fix everything!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> [Magic and Demonology in Ancient Egypt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7jmCfiJCIo) \- This is a rather dry lecture in my opinion, but the content is pretty neat and not something you often see. It’s about the only thing that I was about to find about the concept of someone being possessed in ancient Egypt.
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast Episode 45: The Book of Two Ways](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-45-the-book-of-two-ways/) \- This episode goes into the coffin texts, which were spells used to get to the good part of the afterlife during the Middle Kingdom. The book of the dead didn’t really come into play until the New Kingdom.
> 
> [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CLPVQpqS5E) explains what the so-called book of the dead was and why that’s not really a good term for it. 
> 
> "Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt" by Salima Ikram (source of my heart spell)
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast: An Egyptian Horror Story](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/an-egyptian-horror-story/) \- a discussion of how the ancient Egyptians viewed ghosts and spirits


	16. Harems Aren’t Sexy

You’re gonna hear the word “harem” in my fic. I wanna make sure that you all actually know what that word means, because the image in your head is probably wrong.

When you hear the word “harem”, you probably picture a den of iniquity with lots of scantily clad women and adult activities. Basically a glorified personal brothel for one man or a small group of men. 

This is almost entirely inaccurate. 

Not just for Egypt, but for the middle east in general. Harems were never glorified personal brothels. They were simply the apartments of the royal women (among other things that we’ll go over). Yeah, adult activities might happen there, but that was more of an incidental thing than anything else. It was the women’s home, after all, and you tend to sleep with your husband/lover at your home. That doesn’t make it a sex palace any more than a kitchen makes your home a restaurant.

You may now be wondering where the sexy fantasy version even came from. The answer to that is a little weird. Back in the 19th century, British men traveled to the middle east and discovered the concept of a harem in the most general of senses. All they knew was that it was where the women lived and that only certain men were allowed in (mostly family members at that time). Instead of just saying, “we don’t know what’s in there”, they decided that harems must be sex palaces and media has **_never stopped_ ** using that idea. For a slightly longer overview of this topic, [check out this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrhrXTDeue0&feature=youtu.be&t=172) by Lindsey Ellis. I’ve linked it to the relevant section of the video, but the whole thing is interesting so you could just start at the beginning, too.

Now that we’ve talked about what harems weren’t, let’s talk about what they were as far as the Egyptian New Kingdom was concerned. 

There’s a lot to say here, so let’s just do this fun-fact style:

  * The Egyptian term for this place is not harem, but pare-hen-air (I’m spelling that how you pronounce it, not accurately, btw) which roughly translates to “place of restraint”. I’m still gonna call it a harem because that’s the most accurate term known to English speakers and I am not trying to make this story linguistically accurate because no. Just no. Do you know how complicated that would make my job? This is one type of accuracy we’re going to sacrifice, as is often the case when writing fiction with characters speaking in other languages.
  * The harem was home to the royal women in general, not just the pharaoh’s wives and lovers. This means that you might find the pharaoh’s mother, grandmother, and other female relatives living there. You’d also find kids because the royal children would usually grow up in the harem. 
  * A harem was an actual, physical complex. Sometimes pharaohs would have several of them, but do note that only pharaohs had them. Not even the heir to the throne got one unless he’d been promoted to the role of co-regent. One of the things a new pharaoh would do was establish a harem. That’s why you’re going to hear it come up in the fic. Atemu was a new pharaoh, so he would have needed to pick a place to have his harem(s) built. He’d also be under a lot of pressure to pick a wife if he wasn’t already married. More on that in the note section called "[Love, Marriage, and Homosexuality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26605600/chapters/68834538)"
  * Harems were supposed to be a place that the pharaoh could go to relax in private with his family and trusted officials. There are references to music and socializing in harems. However, the harem could also be dangerous. Put a bunch of ambitious women with immense social power together, give a couple of them children with rights to the throne and, well, power struggles were not uncommon. At least one pharaoh was murdered by members of his harem in order to try and make sure that the “right” potential heir got the throne.
  * Harems were major economic institutions. Huge amounts of land were dedicated to their upkeep and lots of servants were required, which made them a major boost to the local economy of wherever the harem was located.
  * The cloth and clothing used by the royal household was manufactured in the harem. You might even find young women serving as apprentices in the harem as they learned the craft of weaving and sewing. This cloth was considered the finest in the land.
  * You’d see government officials assigned to oversee the harem. This was a prestigious and demanding job.



So, yeah, harems! Not very sexy, but still very important. If Atemu didn't have the building of a harem underway, he probably would be getting bugged about his harem by his advisors even if he didn’t yet have a wife or children since building projects take a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast Episode 65c: Little King Thutmose](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-65c-little-king-thutmose/)
> 
> Ramses II by Mark A. Simpkins and Susan Taylor


	17. Pets in Ancient Egypt

Yes, we’ll be talking about all types of pets, but first: cheetahs!

I have known that cheetahs were pets for the Egyptian elites since I was about eight because of a book called “Strange World: Baboons Waited on Tables in Ancient Egypt, Weird Facts About Ancient Civilizations”. It’s a really short book that just lists one-sentence facts about random ancient cultures. One of these facts was the whole cheetah thing.

I honestly hadn’t thought about that fact in years, but then I decided to write this fic and give Atemu a pet. Originally, it was going to be a house cat (an Egyptian Mau, to be exact), but then I remembered the whole cheetah thing and that was far too fun an idea to ignore.

Random cheetah fun facts time!

Did you know that cheetahs are the most docile of the big cat species? In fact, they’re not even big cats, technically speaking. [“The cheetah is actually the only remaining species of the genus Acinonyx. The feature that distinguishes the Big Cats from the rest of the Felidae family is their ability to roar because they have a floating hyoid bone and a specially adapted larynx. Cheetahs don’t have this adaptation and, as a matter of fact, make more of a chirping sound and are also known to purr.”](https://cheetah.org/canada/2017/09/30/whats-the-difference-between-cheetahs-and-other-big-cats/)

This is important because most big cats are incredibly dangerous. You can’t turn your back on them without risking your life. This isn’t anywhere near as true for cheetahs. There are a lot of videos out there that showcase this, but [here’s one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfsbUZCVA1M&ab_channel=DolphC.Volker) that just shows cheetahs and how shy they are. [This one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZgklu52Rus&ab_channel=BigCatRescue) is a look at how a true big cat would behave. 

Given all that and the fact that cheetahs are the fastest land animal on earth, it’s really not shocking that they were [domesticated by several cultures as both hunting companions and pets.](https://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/cheetah.htm)

None of this is meant to encourage you to get a pet cheetah. They are still dangerous and best suited to live in the wild, but knowing all this and remembering that a pet cheetah was a possibility, well, how could I resist?

Back to the Egyptian stuff!

Cheetahs weren’t _common_ pets, but we do know that they were [associated with the Pharaohs](https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/cheetah/longevity/) and there’s evidence they were [ both pets and a feline form of hunting dog ](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/12/22/egyptians-cheetah/). I’ve not found info on what day-to-day life would have been like for a pet Cheetah, though, so a lot of this is just me using my imagination.

What we do know is that the Egyptian royalty had pets. Oftentimes, those pets were quite exotic. For example, a lion accompanied Ramses in battle and Queen Tuya (Ramses II's mom) had “a cat, a monkey, and goose, all of which were allowed to roam the household freely”.

Some other random Pharaoh pet fun facts:

  * The Pharaoh Intef Wah-ankh had a stela (stone meant to commemorate something for posterity) carved to commemorate his five dogs. It even lists their names, one of which was “blackie”.
  * Cats were the most popular pet with dogs a close second. Baboons were less common, but still around enough to put them in a clear third place.
  * The breed of dog that the Egyptians kept as pets is very similar to the modern “whippet”. 
  * The Egyptian word for cat was “mea” (May-ah) and probably is based on the sound of a “meow”. Similarly, donkey was “eh-ah”, which is probably based on the sound that a donkey makes.
  * We have multiple records of names for dogs, baboons, and horses, indicating that all of these animals were usually given names. Dogs appear to have mostly been given human names while baboons and horses had more odd ones.
  * Cats were rarely given names. For example, we have one cat who was given a special limestone sarcophagus, but yet the only identification for this esteemed feline was “The Cat”. The only named cat that I found was Nedjemet, which translates to "The Pleasant One" (some people think this is the equivalent of “sweetie” or “sweetheart”). I also found a lion whose name translates to "Slayer of His Foes"



That last bullet point is where I got the name for Atemu’s cheetah from. I figured honoring the only known named feline in Egyptian history was a good way to go. It’s also my user name, but that’s just because I wanted something Egyptian and was too lazy to go looking for a different one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:
> 
> All of the hyperlinks above which I'm not relisting here.
> 
> The lecture “The Middle Kingdom - Dynasty XI” from the “The Great Courses” course “The History of Ancient Egypt” by Bob Brier (just talks about pets in general)
> 
> ["More Ancient Egyptian Names of Dogs and Other Animals" By Henry Fischer from the Metropolitan Museum Journal, v. 12 (1977) ](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Ancient_Egyptian_Names_of_Dogs_and_Other_Animals_The_Metropolitan_Museum_Journal_v_12_1977) \- this paper lists off names for the aforementioned dogs, horses, baboons, and lion as well as our sole, named cat.
> 
> [This reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qj2s0/in_ancient_egypt_would_pet_cats_be_given_what_we/) is where I got the link to the above paper and has a pretty interesting discussion of animals names. I didn't use this as a source, though, since I didn't want to go off and verify everything that was said here since none of it was relevant to my fic.


	18. Pharaonic Succession, Priestesses, and Why Priest Seto Makes No Sense

You might be wondering: why did I make Isis Atemu’s sister? Why is she married to Seti?

Short answer: so that Seti can be the next pharaoh.

Long answer:

The way that the show and manga handle Atemu naming his successor is wildly inaccurate. First off, just telling Seti, “hey, you should be the next pharaoh” does diddly squat because no one else is there to hear it. Same thing goes for Seti finding out who his father is.

While this is never addressed in cannon, it is highly likely that Atemu has a large extended family. Pharaohs tended to have a lot of kids, so even if Atemu was his father’s only son or even only child, there are likely lots of other branches of the royal family mucking about. Second cousins, sisters of the previous pharaoh, all that jazz. In other words, if Atemu died without producing an heir or officially setting one up, there would probably be people with a legitimate claim to the throne. Add in that the next pharaoh was, in some ways, chosen by the priesthood or at least confirmed by them and, yeah, Seti would likely not wind up wearing the crown.

As the seemingly only child of the previous pharaoh’s brother, Seti  _ would  _ have something of a claim, but only if he was a  _ properly acknowledged _ son. This is why cannon baffles me. There was no reason to have Seti hide away (we’ll talk about this more in a bit), especially because it removes his ability to take the throne without Atemu doing something to make that happen.

This is the point where we should talk about the rules of succession in ancient Egypt. Or, really, the lack of rules of succession. While there may have been some sort of obvious way that this worked, the Egyptians never wrote it down. It also doesn’t seem likely because these things could get complex given that pharaohs had multiple wives.

The eldest son of the current pharaoh gets the throne, right? Nope! Not always true. There’s evidence that, while Egypt was a patriarchy (men held more power than women), it was also somewhat matrilineal (who your mom was mattered more than who your dad was). If the pharaoh managed to father multiple sons and one came from a lesser wife, it might not matter which boy was older. The son of the “Great Royal Wife” seems to have taken precedence. Or, if they both came from lesser wives, it might matter that one wife was of royal Egyptian blood and the other was not.

Of course, we don’t know how exactly all that worked and, if the pharaoh had a favorite son, he could probably pick them over the others. Like I said, the Egyptians never bothered to write this stuff down. We don’t even know the names of most of the pharaohs’ kids and wives. Until a child was named the successor or at least reached adulthood, they often went unrecorded. Weird, right?

What we do know is that, when a Pharaoh didn’t have an heir, he usually had to do something to make sure power passed smoothly. We have several instances of pharaohs not producing a son or even a daughter. In a lot of these cases, the pharaoh in question would name another man his heir and then have that man marry a royal woman (I told you arranged marriages weren’t unheard of).

For example, Amunhotep I (arguably the first pharaoh of the new kingdom) ruled for 20 years and yet, as far as we know, he had no children. If he did have kids, then none of them lived to adulthood. His successor (Tuthmosis I) was a trusted official who married the king’s cousin prior to his ascension to the throne and then married the king’s sister after his ascension. Tuthmosis I didn’t randomly take power, either. The king chose him and had him act as a co-regent to help ensure that Tuthmosis’ position was secure.

If a pharaoh died before he could name an heir, then things could get tricky. However, once again, it seems like whoever was married to the king’s daughter, sister, or cousin could inherit at this point by virtue of the fact that the wife in question was of the royal bloodline, meaning that her children would carry on the blood of the gods. There are several times in Egyptian history where this kind of thing happened.

So, long story short, I have Isis and Seti married so that, upon Atemu’s death, Seti could more easily take the throne. It’s a minor change at best and not so much about shipping as it is about making a believable story. Don’t mishear me, I do like these two as a couple, just know that this particular pairing would have been needed even if I didn’t like it. I could have also made a random OC Atemu’s sister, but I try to avoid OC’s at all costs when writing fan fiction. It was much simpler to just make Isis a royal. Especially since she probably would have been one (more on that in a bit).

Seti is also going to have a claim by virtue of the fact that he’s known to be the son of the previous pharaoh’s brother through a concubine. That’s right, we’re scrapping the hidden family thing and instead making Seti have a claim, just not one that’s strong on its own. Why? Because I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why cannon had the secret family plot beyond melodrama.

Here’s the thing, random street urchins didn’t get to be high priests. To be a high priest, you needed to go through years of training in childhood and then be chosen for the position. Family ties could play a role here. So could wealth. Without his father, Seti is implied to have had neither.

The aforementioned years of training would start with schooling in reading and writing somewhere around the age of six. Remember how we talked about Seti’s age a couple note sections ago? How, at the time he was hidden away, he was around five? Yeah, that’s kind-of stupid, isn’t it? At best, Akhenaden (Seti’s dad) would have only been able to go a year or two before he needed to get involved in his son’s life again in order for Seti to be properly trained.

I’m also not sure how hiding him was supposed to keep Seti safe seeing as he clearly became involved with the royals anyway.

Like, sure, if Seti was some random person that they found out about while going through the memory world, then that plot would make total sense. He’s not, though. He’s a fully recognized high priest, chosen for the position by his own father. That means that, even if he was trained in writing elsewhere, he was likely brought around the royals by his early teens to begin training as a priest. You might be thinking, but wait, didn’t being poor allow him to meet Kisara? Only in the anime! In the manga, they don’t meet until they’re adults.

I made Mana Atemu’s cousin for similar reasons. For her to be a childhood friend, it makes a lot of sense to have her be someone who lived in the royal harem since that’s likely where Atemu would have spent most of his formative years. I could have just made her the daughter of a servant, but she’s a priestess (magicians were pretty much exclusively priests or priestesses. It wasn’t a separate job). Just like Seti, for her to be a priestess, she’d need training from a young age, meaning she’d need to be the daughter of an affluent family. There’s evidence that most priestesses were married to priests, too, with the biggest known exception being a role associated with the royal family.

There was a role in the great temple of Karnak called “the God’s wife of Amun”. Whoever held this role was basically the most important person in the temple and it was always held by a woman of the royal household. This role first shows up in the new kingdom and is used on and off from then on. The first woman to hold this title was a Great Royal Wife, but by the time our story takes place, the role had morphed so that it was only held by an unmarried woman who was a virgin.

So, yeah, for Isis and Mana to be priestesses or priestesses in training who were given leave to run about the palace, they’d pretty much have to be from super important families. I just went all out and made them family because I wanted to acknowledge Atemu’s likely large family while also not adding OC’s. I was so tempted to add his mom….

If you want Mana’s full story: her mother was a royal woman who married a high-ranking non-royal, had a kid, and then lost her husband. After that, she moved back into the royal harem by virtue of being of royal blood. This all happened when Atemu was about two and Mana was around one. They were fast friends and total terrors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:
> 
> "Gods Rites, Rituals, and Religion of Ancient Egypt" by Lucia Gahlin
> 
> The lecture “The Beginning of the New Kingdom - The Fabulous XVIIIth Dynasty” from the “The Great Courses” course “The History of Ancient Egypt” by Bob Brier
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast Episode 56: The Return of the King](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-56-the-return-of-the-king/) \- This episode talks about the establishment of the role of "Gods Wife of Amun"
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast Episode 57: All Things Good and Pure](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-57-all-things-good-and-pure/) \- This episode and the one after it discuss how Amunhotep I made Thutmose I his successor
> 
> [The Egyptian History Podcast Mini Episode: Inauguration Day](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/mini-episode-inauguration-day/) \- This episode talks about Pharaonic succession and the lack of rules
> 
> I think those are all the episodes I referenced, but there are many others that talk about instances where the pharaoh didn't have a son and what happened.


	19. Educating Pharaohs

The life of an heir apparent or young pharaoh would not have been an easy one. They were expected to be physically fit, religiously zealous, and educated enough to run a country. Hardly a fun time for a little kid or young teen. I actually based Marik’s list of training on what a pharaoh would go through. I just added a few languages to the mix to modernize it a bit. He also got trained in drawing because of the millennium necklace, which he was expected to know how to wield, just in case.

So, let’s get a bit more detailed on the ancient Egyptian side of things.

Literacy was a huge deal in ancient Egypt, especially during the time of the New Kingdom. Yes, only a tiny fraction of the population was literate (and most of those were men), but that doesn’t mean that literacy wasn’t deeply important to those in power. Writing let them communicate accurately over great distances. It let them record important acts and ceremonies. It even let them speak with forign nations through the use of translators.

Because of all this, by the time of the New Kingdom, anyone who held any sort of political power needed to be literate. A young pharaoh would have been trained to read and write in the ancient Egyptan version of school. This event took several hours a day and would have likely seen the children (mostly or even all male) copying religious or political texts.

We can’t forget the athletics, though!

Since pharaohs were supposed to be strong warriors and often went into battle, it was important for a young pharaoh to be physically fit. Archery, chariot riding, wrestling, sword-fighting, spear-fighting, and running would have all been standard practice.

In fact, here’s a look at what we think a day in the life of young Thutmose III would be like: he’d be up before dawn for religious practices, then physical training until it got hot, then training in reading and writing and math and political stuff, then more religious stuff, then sleep until just before dawn and do it all again!

Basically, assume Tem is heavily educated, extremely fit, and in desperate need of a vacation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> [Episode 57: All Things Good and Pure](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-57-all-things-good-and-pure/)  
> [The Egyptian History Podcast Episode 65c: Little King Thutmose](https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/episode-65c-little-king-thutmose/)  
> Both of these episodes deal with the early lives of pharaohs who gained the crown years before they actually got to rule the country. As heir apparent, Tem's life would have been a little less regimented because he wouldn't have had official, religious duties just yet, but this is still a pretty reasonable glimpse of his exhausting daily life.


	20. Khopesh (Swords in Egypt vs Modern Day)

Weaponry is **_so_** not my area of interest, but it _is_ Atemu’s, so I had to do some research in order to let him geek out properly. Note that I did not go too in-depth here because it’s not super relevant to the story.

First things first, the swords in the show are WRONG, historically speaking (they also wouldn't be riding horses, but that's a different rant). Here are a few screencaps that let you see said swords:

If I look at a [sword type chart](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/ag5jj5/telling_apart_some_common_sword_types/), these things **_possibly_ **resemble a [falchion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falchion), which is a European weapon. What they do not even remotely resemble is this:

This, my friends, is a khopesh. It’s the sword most commonly associated with Egypt and it’s pretty freaking badass [as this video shows.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OukyEkqV434.)

Weapons technology at this point in history didn’t allow for long swords because weapons were most commonly cast, not forged. This means that all swords were some form of short-sword. In Egypt, they'd either be a simple straight sword or the sickle-like khopesh. Khopesh seem to be far more common and are a max of two feet in length. They weigh between one and two pounds.

Another difference you might notice between the show and the khopesh is the color of the blades. The show has silver swords, the khopesh is bronze. That’s because the khopesh is a bronze-age weapon since the New Kingdom took place during the bronze-age. You would not see steel or iron swords for quite some time. Bronze weapons were soft and could dull quickly when compared to iron and steel weapons. This doesn’t mean bronze weapons weren’t deadly, just that there’s a reason we traded up to iron and then steel.

The khopesh was actually somewhat out of favor by 1000 BCE due to a lack of bronze (its last known large-scale use was around 1300 BCE), but you’d likely still see the weapon around. It just wouldn’t be as widely used by the army due to supply issues. We see the word khopesh used as late as 200 BCE.

How would you use a khopesh?

Well, it's mainly a slashing weapon as opposed to a stabbing one and that curve in the blade was likely used to grab shields. This makes it versatile and it's a pretty solid short-sword even now. However, you'd probably try to avoid blade-on-blade contact if you could since bronze weapons were soft and could get bent pretty easily. Not an issue in a one-on-one fight, but in a war with fight after fight? Yeah, you don't want your sword getting bent out of shape.

So all this brought me to my next question: what would actually impress a bronze-age kid when it came to weapons advancements?

I posted a video in the sources showing bronze weapons vs iron and the strength difference is pretty incredible. If you watch this, remember, steel is **_even stronger_** than iron. So just letting a bronze-age kid have a proper sword fight would likely stun them, especially if you let them use their old weapons. The other point of interest would be the length of the swords. Forged weapons can be MUCH larger than cast ones. You really can't go much longer than two feet with bronze, but steel can be used to make buildings.

* * *

I've mentioned this elsewhere, but some quick notes on why Atemu would be a weapon nerd.

Training for war was not something you could do overnight. It required constant practice and Atemu was expected to be an active military leader. In the modern day, that means standing back and directing troops. In the New Kingdom, it meant leading the chariot charge. Several pharaohs were even killed on the battlefield.

Because of these expectations, a large amount of Atemu's childhood would have been spent training on how to fight with melee weapons, bow, and fists. You can bet contests of skill were a big deal during training and Atemu has a competitive streak a mile long, so it absolutely fits that he’d get super into it. As with anything in life, the more important it is in your day-to-day, the more invested in it you become. It's pretty likely that Atemu would have developed an appreciation for weaponry. Embracing this made for a fun way to give him a personality that went beyond card games. At the age of 16, it’s possible that he’d even have seen combat, though it’s not necessarily true. It all depends on what was going on during his childhood. He would almost definitely have seen combat had he ruled for more than a few months. I decided to keep him innocent for my fic, but we do know of pharaohs and princes going into battle or even war as young as 14 or 15.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> [Really cool video on how they figure out what ancient fighting styles were that focuses primarily on the khopesh.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoCbm3-9MtM&t=82s)
> 
> [Video on bronze weapons vs iron weapons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V28ItY0K9ts) Starting at around the 19-minute mark, they actually hit bronze weapons against an iron one. It is IMMEDIATELY apparent which one is better.
> 
> [General history of the khopesh](https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/egyptian-sword-khopesh-0011222)


	21. Food in Ancient Egypt

People actually requested this one so I MAY have gone a little overboard….

* * *

The people of ancient Egypt had it a lot better than many other ancient cultures. Their home on the Nile had a temperature that was relatively consistent, never super hot or below freezing. They also didn’t have to deal with a lot of climate issues. Rain was rare and seems to have been considered an ill omen. While other cultures had to depend on this particular weather pattern for their food, the Egyptians could rely on the annual flooding of the Nile with pretty remarkable consistency. While there were times when the Nile failed to flood and drought occurred, they seem to be pretty infrequent. Fun fact: by the New Kingdom, taxes were based in part on how high the flood was in a given year because that would tell you how many crops you could expect to grow. That’s how consistent life was in Egypt.

Given all that, it shouldn’t shock you to learn that the Egyptians ate pretty well when compared to other ancient cultures. Their diets were quite varied and we even know a couple of recipes they used, though there’s also a lot we don’t know. No full out Egyptian recipe book exists as far I’m aware. In order to give this some logic, let’s just go category by category for what you might see if you were to go back in time to the days of the pharaohs. 

We’ll start with the topic of animals, but know that, for the average Egyptian, their daily food was pretty vegetarian. The interview in my sources even says “the average egyptian is going to be eating a lot of legumes, a lot of veg, a lot of grain based food (bread, very dominant, probably types of gruels) and then they’re going to drink a lot of beer.”

* * *

**Poultry and Eggs**

Birds were a common source of protein, but not chicken. While that’s normally what we think of when we hear poultry, an ancient Egyptian would think of things like geese, duck, quail, pigeon, cranes, and other waterfowl. Some of these were domesticated back then and those were the types of poultry you’d see eaten by the wealthy. The poor favored wild game. Because there was some domestication of poultry, eggs were not uncommon. Once again, those were more likely to be seen on wealthy tables than the tables of the poor.

* * *

**Meat and Dairy**

There were a ton of cattle in ancient Egypt. In fact, one of the duties of the pharaoh was counting the cattle in the land and the records of these counts are one of the ways Egyptologists figure out how long pharaohs reigned. While cattle appear to have been the most commonly domesticated animal, there were others and this count was not exclusive to cattle. It also logged sheep, pigs, goats, and donkeys. With all these animals around, it’s not surprising that milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products could be found on wealthy tables.

* * *

**Fish**

They lived on a river, of course they ate fish! However, there is some evidence that fish was considered unclean and it  _ might  _ have been completely avoided by royalty and priests. If this taboo did exist, it wasn’t universal, though. There are definitely temples where fish were eaten and the general populace certainly had no issue eating them. Even if it was allowed, fish would have been a cheaper food because of the Nile, so it probably wouldn’t be a delicacy.

* * *

**Vegetables**

The ancient Egyptians ate a ton of veggies with onions, garlic, leeks, lentils, cabbage, radishes, turnips, legumes, and cucumbers being the most common cultivated ones. You could also find wild veggies such as celery, papyrus stalks, and onions growing on the banks of the Nile. Garlic and onion in particular seem to have been considered to have medicinal qualities and were used to treat blood disorders, colds, and stomach complaints. We have evidence that they just ate garlic by itself in addition to using it as a flavoring for other food.

* * *

**Fruits**

This one’s interesting because it’s one of the areas where we know that the Egyptians (or certain invaders) imported plants. There are a lot of things that only show up around the New Kingdom. Older pharaohs would not have known them. Because of that, this list of known fruits is only accurate for the New Kingdom: olives, pomegranates, grapes, figs, and dates. Of those, dates were the most popular by far. They also had coconuts, but only as an imported food eaten by the wealthy. These are just some of the fruits we know of. There are others that were possibly less common. For example, I have Atemu mentioning that he doesn't like nabk berries, which is another name for jujube. My one source claims "Nabk grew wild and are a frequent funerary offering." I just thought the name was cool, which is why I picked that to be his least favorite.

With all these fruits, it’s not shocking that fruit juice was a thing, too. It was not the most popular form of drink, though.

* * *

**Beer**

Beer was the most popular form of drink. It’s considered one of the two Egyptian staples and was a common form of payment for services rendered. Here’s the thing, though. When we think of beer in the modern day, we think of something you drink to get drunk. Something, in fact, made almost specifically to get you drunk. This was not true for ancient Egypt. In the days of the pharaohs, water was not safe to drink and they didn’t know how to make it safe other than through fermentation. Because of that, the goal of beer in ancient Egypt was less “get drunk” and more "attain calories and avoid parasites” (not that they knew what those were). This is why everyone from children to adults drank beer and they drank it for every meal.

There’s evidence that the daily beer was very low in alcohol content, especially since drunkenness was considered a bad thing unless it was during specific festivals. The interview in my notes even suggests that daily beer was more of a malt beverage than alcoholic one, though other scholars disagree. Beer drunk for festivals and the like definitely had a significant alcohol content, though. The Egyptians even had a festival of drunkenness. 

Does all that mean that Atemu would potentially not have a good idea of how to pace himself on modern beer? Yes. Yes it does. I’m not going to be able to fit that into the main fic, but I do want to play with it, so maybe I’ll give you a oneshot when this is all said and done because  **I am here** for drunk Atemu.

Okay, back to the Egyptology.

Beer could be flavored by things like herbs, fruits, or honey, especially when it was served to the wealthy. One of my sources specifically notes that the beer found in Tutankhamun’s tomb was honey beer similar to European mead. That’s a pretty good summary for this one, so let’s move on to the other main Egyptian staple.

* * *

**Bread**

Bread was the second ancient Egyptian staple and was consumed at basically every meal. Like beer, which could be flavored by additives, bread could also be quite varied. The most basic (and likely most common) recipe was flour and water kneaded into dough and then cooked over a fire. More complex recipes saw the addition of herbs, coriander seeds, eggs, butter, honey, and/or dried fruits, but these would be expensive and likely only eaten by the wealthy. Because of Egypt’s climate, we actually have a lot of bread that has survived in tombs, giving us a great idea of the variety available to the ancients. We know that they had both flat breads and leaven bread made through use of yeast. Many of my sources mention sweet breads or cake being a thing, too.

The way bread flour was made was a moderately complex process involving first grinding with a mortar and pestle, then further grinding on a thing called a quern. You might have heard that sand was also involved, but... “experimental work with ancient querns has shown that no grit was needed to aid the milling process, as is sometimes suggested, and flour textures could be precisely controlled by the miller.” I have seen some sources indicate that the primitive tools used in the production process introduced bits of finely ground stone to the flour, which makes sense, but this was an unintended side-effect of the production process. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that such things were added on purpose. At least, not in any of the four sources I referenced for this section.

Both bread and beer were mainly made from emmer wheat (also known as farrow), which was Egypt's main grain. Emmer wheat is a pretty balanced source of nutrition and is higher in minerals and fiber than similar grains.

* * *

**Wine**

While beer may not have always been alcoholic, wine definitely was. It was also considered a very high class affair that you’d really only see in the homes of the wealthy or as offerings either to the gods or the dead. It appears that wine was treated very similarly to how we treat it in the modern day with jugs found in tombs having inscriptions like “Year 5, sweet wine of the Estate of Aten of the Western River, chief vintner Nakht”. You also have ancients describing wine by its quality, something you don’t really see for beer. This shows that beer was more a common beverage while wine was elevated to something special. Yes, ancient Egypt probably had wine snobs. Atemu might be a bit young to be one, but don’t let that stop you! I will not judge.

We know that wine was made from grapes using the standard pick, stomp, press, ferment process that you see in lots of ancient cultures. We also know that it came in red, white and something called “shedeh”. Egyptologists aren’t sure what that means just yet, though evidence appears to suggest it may just be another type of grape. Wine was likely also made from other fruits such as dates, palms, and possibly even honey, but those don’t appear to be as common based on my limited research. I also found some indication that things such as herbs and, once again, maybe honey could be added to wine.

* * *

**Spices**

Egypt was located in a place that made it a crossroads for ancient spice roads, meaning that they had lots of options to get spices. By the New Kingdom, they definitely had things from the East like cumin, coriander, and cinnamon. They also definitely had salt which was used in the preservation of meat.

I had a hard time finding more info on spices, so I’m just gonna quote the short paragraph I found: “Historically, culinary spices and herbs have been used as food preservatives and for their health- enhancing properties. Papyri from Ancient Egypt in1555 BC classified coriander, fennel, juniper, cumin, garlic and thyme as health promoting spices. Records from that time also note that laborers who constructed the  Great Pyramid of Cheops consumed onion and garlic as a means to promote health.”

I also found this: "Dill, fenugreek,chervil, parsley, thyme, coriander, white and black cumin, fennel, marjoram, and possiblymint were all native to Egypt. Cinnamon and peppercorns were imported, and available to wealthy Egyptians by the New Kingdom. "

* * *

**Oils**

While the Egyptians had olives, they did not have olive oil. Instead, they had a variety of vegetables oils that were used for cooking. They also used animal fat.

* * *

**Ta’meya/Falafel**

Yeah I’m dedicating a section to this one food because I spent a  **_stupid_ ** amount of time trying to figure out if Atemu would actually know it because it’s supposedly his favorite food. A bunch of sources mention that it  **_may_ ** go back to pharaonic Egypt as some sort of fun fact, but none of them give any evidence as to why they think that. Finally, just as I was about to go mad, I found this:

_ Falafel was almost certainly developed in Egypt, although when and by whom is a matter of debate. Some have suggested that it dates back to ancient times, though this is almost certainly incorrect. There are no references to anything resembling falafel in pharaonic texts; in any case, the vegetable oil in which falafel is fried was then too expensive to be used to cook such a simple dish. Nor does it seem any more likely that falafel was invented by Coptic Christians as meat-free food for Lent. There is not a shred of evidence to support this; besides, ‘falafel’ is most definitely not a Coptic word. In all probability, falafel is comparatively modern. As Paul Balta and Farouk Mardam Bey have shown, falafel only appears in Egyptian literature after the British occupation in 1882. _

You can read the full article [here.](https://www.historytoday.com/archive/historians-cookbook/falafel)

So, yeah, really unlikely to have been a food Atemu knew. However, the ingredients are mostly things he’d know. [Here’s a recipe](https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/254743/taameya-egyptian-falafel/) and pretty much everything but the cilantro and sesame seeds are things I’ve found to be associated with ancient Egypt. I’m not certain how common fava beans were, but they’re unlikely to be the main source of flavor here. Garlic, cumin, onion, and coriander are all really strong flavors that Atemu would probably know. Given all that, you can make it his favorite food, but only if you’re having it be his  _ modern  _ favorite. If you want an ancient recipe for him to crave, the lovely [SerenaJones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenaJones/pseuds/SerenaJones) shared this one with me. It’s a recipe found on a tomb wall that details the making of a sweet treat made of honey and a type of tuber called a ‘tiger nut’.

* * *

**Table Manners**

To finish this off, a quick note about table manners! Silverware wasn't a thing. Instead, you ate with your hands and probably just cleaned them off often. Cups, bowels, and dishes were things, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources not already linked:
> 
> [This is the best broad overview of Egyptian cuisine that I found. If you only want one thing to read, this is it.](https://www.academia.edu/3265947/2001_Diet_The_Oxford_Encyclopedia_of_Ancient_Egypt_New_York_Oxford_University_Press_390_395)
> 
> [interview about beer which also gives you a really good idea of how hard it is to be an Egyptologist.](https://play.acast.com/s/egyptianhistorypodcast/interview-alcohol-economicswithprof.leslieannewarden)
> 
> [article on beer in ancient Egypt](https://www.ancient.eu/article/1033/beer-in-ancient-egypt/)
> 
> [article on agriculture in ancient Egypt](https://www.ancient.eu/article/997/ancient-egyptian-agriculture/)
> 
> [article on bread in ancient Egypt](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316587464_Bread_in_Ancient_Egypt_Bread_in_Ancient_Egypt)
> 
> [another article on bread in ancient Egypt (warning, it's a pdf if you care)](http://ancientgrains.org/samuel2001oup.pdf)
> 
> [top ten list that I used to as a basis for how to structure this and as a guide on what to look into](https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/egypt-history/top-10-popular-ancient-egyptian-food/)
> 
> [paper on wine in ancient egypt](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307839795_IREP_EN_KEMET_WINE_OF_ANCIENT_EGYPT_DOCUMENTING_THE_VITICULTURE_AND_WINEMAKING_SCENES_IN_THE_EGYPTIAN_TOMBS)
> 
> [article on wine in ancient egypt](http://www.touregypt.net/egypt-info/magazine-mag11012000-magf2.htm)
> 
> [article on spices in ancient egypt](https://www.history.com/news/spices-of-life-in-ancient-egypt)
> 
> [general article on the history of spices](https://www.mccormickscienceinstitute.com/resources/history-of-spices)


	22. Reincarnation & Resurrection

I’m gonna be “debunking” some popular fan theories in this notes section. This is not to say that these theories are bad or dumb. I actually really like a lot of them. They just aren’t possible **_when using ancient Egyptian beliefs_ ** and my fic is dedicated to playing with ancient Egyptian beliefs. So, yeah, they’re off the table **for me** , but don’t let me make you feel like these are bad ideas. They’re not. They’re just bad if you’re trying to do something religiously accurate, which most fics aren’t and that’s okay. Just wanted to make that extra clear.

On with the show!

Resurrection and reincarnation are two wildly different concepts, but we’re hitting both today for three reasons. First, they are related in that they both have to do with what happens when we die. Second, both are popular in YuGiOh fics. Third, reincarnation as it relates to ancient Egypt can be summed up thusly: the Egyptians had no mythology or beliefs about the concept of reincarnation.

This is why I made a lot of the characters descendants of ancient Egyptians, not reincarnations. As soon as you add reincarnation, you’re not telling an authentically Egyptian story (whatever that means). Along the same lines, while the Egyptians believed that a soul had many parts, as you’ve hopefully noticed, only one of those parts has something to do with your true self/personality. This means that, even if you use reincarnation, you can’t use Egyptian beliefs to justify Yuugi and Atemu sharing a soul. In other words, saying that the “Hikiras” are the “light” parts of the “Yami’s” souls doesn’t work because there was no “light” and “dark” part of the soul.

Now, you might be thinking “but wait, didn’t the pharaoh embody a god? Doesn’t that make him some sort of reincarnation?”

And the answer to that is no. The pharaoh is not an Egyptian version of the avatar. The Egyptian beliefs about the pharaoh being a god were very complex. The god Horus was still his own person as was the god Osiris, but by the New Kingdom, the pharaoh somehow joined with Horus in life and Osiris in death. You’ll also note that the pharaoh’s heir lived at the same time as the pharaoh and sometimes you had two pharaohs at once. So, yeah, not reincarnation. Reincarnation makes way more sense than their actual beliefs, which we still don’t fully understand.

In summary, you wanna make a fic that's accurate to Egyptian beliefs? Then reincarnation is off the table. Yuugi and Atemu are their own people.

Resurrection, on the other hand, was totally a thing! Their entire religion was based on the idea of resurrection. There’s just one problem: they believed that you were resurrected into another world. The idea of a person being brought back to life in **this** world is not a thing in any of their mythology. The only myths that even kind-of touch on this idea are _Iset and the Seven Scorpions_ and a similar tale involving Iset, baby Horus, and Thoth.

In both stories, a young child gets stung by a scorpion and dies. The mom then freaks out and a deity comes along to save the kid. In the first version, it’s Iset. In the second, it’s Thoth. Other than the deity switch, they’re basically identical as far as the resurrection is concerned.

I use the term “resurrection” lightly because it’s not a _true_ resurrection. The kid has only just died when the saving happens, which means that they’re more resuscitations than resurrections. If you’re not familiar with that word, resuscitation is where a person is brought back to life within minutes of their death and we don’t really view this as a miracle. It’s just a literal life hack.

Let’s get back to resurrection.

There are no Egyptian myths featuring someone fully dying and then being brought back to this world days, months, or even years later. When you’re dead, you're dead. There is no coming back to this world even if you’re a god.

This brings us to another myth: the legend of Osiris' resurrection. This myth is the reason why Horus is the god of our world and his father, Osiris, is the god of the dead.

See, Osiris was originally the god of our world, but he was murdered by his brother (Seth). After that, Osiris’ wife (Iset) recovered her husband’s body and gave him a proper burial. This allowed Osiris to resurrect in the land of the dead and become its god. It did not allow him to come back to life in our world. This myth is the foundational myth for pretty much everything to do with mummification and funerary rights in Egypt, by the way.

Based on this, if you wanna tell a truly Egyptian story, then resurrection is off the table. If the literal king of the gods and his wife (who was basically the queen of magic) couldn't figure out how do it, then no one can. Someone dies? They are dead. No second chances. You can only reunite with your lover in the field of reeds once you’ve both gone to be with Osiris. In fact, as best I can tell, having someone resurrect to our world would be as confusing as reincarnation to an ancient Egyptian. It just really was not a thing.

Before we end this chapter, though, I do want to mention one last thing: Egypt was not always ruled by an Egyptian pharaoh. They had rulers from several other cultures over the years.

Of particular interest is the last dynasty, the Ptolemies, which was made up of Greeks and they really did **_not_ **embrace the culture. Most of them never even bothered to learn the language. That’s actually why the Rosetta stone has Greek on it. The text of that stone is basically a public thank you note to one of the Greek pharaohs and they wanted to make sure that he could read it and he only read Greek.

So, if you want to de-age Atemu and say he was a Greek ruling during the Ptolemaic period, then you CAN use resurrection because the Greeks _loved_ that idea. You’re just using the Greek gods, not the Egyptian ones.

Am I going to do that? 

No. 

No I am not.

One overly-researched fanfiction is (probably) enough for me, thanks, but I did want to mention that it’s a thing because it’s a fun thing. I like the idea of Yuugi playing the Greek Hero saving the soul of his beloved from the realm of Hades. I just don’t like it enough to want to write it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources:  
> I'm being a bit lazy for this one and I'm not giving specific sources because I didn't specifically reference anything while writing this. The reincarnation bits are source-less because how do you source the absence of something?  
> The resurrections bits are source-less because this is another one of those things that you just come to understand by learning about ancient Egypt. Like the Bob Briar lecture series that I reference in other notes sections has a bunch of lectures where he uses the term "resurrectionists" when talking about Egyptian beliefs. Many episodes of the podcast I link just drop mentions about "resurrection to the next life". Almost any book or lecture about Egyptian beliefs will touch on it. It's basically as commonly understood as saying "the pyramids were build during the old Kingdom". About the only thing I could source are the myths I touched upon, but those are really easy to google, so I didn't go and find a source for them.


	23. Kul Elna - Village of… Builders?

Let’s talk about tomb robbing as it applies to ancient Egypt. More specifically, was there actually a village of tomb robbers?

It might surprise you to learn that the answer to that is "yes". By the end of the New Kingdom, there was indeed a village associated with the robbing of wealthy tombs. Its ancient name was Set-Ma'at (“The Place of Truth”), but the modern moniker is “Deir el-Medina”. If you’ve heard of this village, then you’ve probably heard of it as a place of artisans and builders.

This is not inaccurate. 

Amenhotep I founded Deir el-Medina in the early days of the New Kingdom for one specific reason: to stop the robbing of tombs (ironic, no?). The idea behind Deir el-Medina was that it would be a village unlike any other in the ancient world. Instead of having farmers and a few craftsement, it would instead be nothing but craftsement. Basically all of the people needed to construct tombs and almost no one else. The idea was that, by isolating the craftsement, knowledge of tomb locations would be kept more secret. It was also believed that, because the village would be reliant on the state for food, the inhabitants would be unlikely to rob the tombs themselves since doing such a thing carried heavy penalties and wouldn’t exactly set you up for life.

See, tomb robbing in the ancient world was complex. Because ancient Egypt was a barter economy, you couldn’t just take a bunch of gold into town and come back with food. Most people had no personal use for items of such wealth and owning stolen tomb goods was incredibly risky. If you knew of stolen goods, you were expected to report on them. By keeping them, you were risking at least a beating, but potentially your life! In order to make tomb robbing worth it, you basically had to know someone both wealthy and corrupt. This person would pay you for the goods with something like grain and then go repurpose the goods into something else so that they wouldn’t be recognized.

So, yeah, Deir el-Medina, village of tomb builders! The idea of this village seems to have mostly worked at first. However, by the late New Kingdom, the government wasn’t as stable as it once was and the isolated village stopped getting its monthly supplies on time. Since the village relied on these supplies for food, things got a bit tense between the government and its workers. Soon after, there was a massive uptick in the robbing of tombs.

You can read more details in my source article, but the basic story here is that Thief King Bakura would likely be the child of both tomb robbers and tomb builders. After all, you need to know how to build something to break into it! It wasn't something just anyone could do! So, not some village of wretched scum. More like a village of annoyed craftsmen who were at their wits end because they weren’t getting paid on time.

Also worth noting, Deir el-Medina was located basically right beside the Valley of the Kings or an hour’s walk from Luxor/Thebes. That means that it’s damn near perfect to be the site of Kul Elna. Far enough away that no one would know exactly what happened, yet close enough that you could get there and back quickly. Of course, making this Kul Elna does mean that you'd basically bring about the end of Deir el-Medina since you’re killing off all the craftsmen. Does that work?

Kind of?

Deir el-Medina was in use until the collapse of the New Kingdom, but that was in 1069, which is right around when Atemu ruled. Plus Yugioh is obviously altering the timeline with its monsters and magic. Given all that, it’s not too far out there to have Deir el-Medina serve this function and then say that any subsequent tombs were just built by craftsmen brought in from elsewhere. After all, tombs were constructed throughout Egypt. Deir el-Medina was only built to service the Valley of the Kings. Everywhere else used common craftsmen. Also, having it be Deir el-Medina would help make Atemu feel truly remorseful about these deaths because they’re not random thieves. They’re people specifically under the crown's care who turned to robbery because of the crown’s failings. I find that neat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I'm just giving you one source for this one](https://www.ancient.eu/article/1095/tomb-robbing-in-ancient-egypt/) and it's not long, so you should check it out!
> 
> Note that the idea that tombs were probably robbed by the builders themselves dates back to the Old Kingdom, but a village of builders is very specific to the New Kingdom.


End file.
